“Conviction’s all we lack,” I said. “That determination not simply to be ourselves, but to be anybody. We should carry our conviction like a hammer. It doesn’t matter what we build. It only matters that we act. It only matters that we build.” I was soaring now. I was thipping across the lane dividers in Mom’s luminous car again. I saw Buellton. I saw Fresno. I saw Salinas. I felt Mom’s voice rising in me strong and intrepid for the first time in months. I would never die. Mom would never leave me. “We’re like armies of men, political nations, the corporate arrangements of cells, tissues and bodies. We’re not children, Rodney. We’re the world. We’re greater than the world, because we can make it into anything we want it to be–no matter who tells us otherwise. We’re all that matters, Rodney. All that matters are our strategic situations, and the tactical stuff we use in order to get where we want to go, in order to take what we want. Where we are, what we get, how we get it–that’s all that really matters. We act together, Rodney, just like always. You and I. It’s not like we have any choice. It doesn’t matter if you like it, or if I like it, or even if we like each other. It just is, Rodney. You and I just are. We’re stuck with each other. We’re friends for life.”
Rodney had hardly touched his tidy fragment of sandwich. He examined it distantly now where it rested on his jiggling knee like a trained hamster.
“I liked that damn dog, Phillip. You knew that. It wasn’t like you had any right. It wasn’t like it was your dog or anything.”
I could hardly recognize Rodney. A blue pentangle had been tattooed around the frame of his left eye. His hair had been shaved back to reveal a high, shiny forehead; it was tonsured and dyed a streaky, phosphorescent green. His room was filled with books on voodoo, black arts and magic. A cone of sandalwood incense burned on a tiny brass devotional table decorated with the bodies of naked, writhing women with serpentine hair and pointed breasts. From his left pierced ear dangled a silver earring intricately carved with the skull of a leering baboon. The floors and furniture were littered with various lurid paperbacks with bright red colors depicting flames, apocalypse, demons and witches and complicated demonic symbols. The books bore titles such as Hell Town U.S.A., Cry the Children, The Book of Satanic Myth and Lore, UFO Sightings Unveiled and Sydney Omar’s Guide to Astrology: Taurus. “I’m glad you finally developed an interest in reading,” I said after a while. “It always helps to find a subject that interests you.”
“I GUESS I’VE just been bored,” Rodney admitted later, while I was searching through his closet and rearranging the piles of moldering laundry I found there. “Bored bored bored. Jesus Rice Krispies I’ve been fucking bored. Getting up, eating Ethel’s lousy goddamn breakfasts, going to school. And the teacher’s droning on about this and that and the other thing. I try to tell the teacher, you know. I don’t give a fuck about geometry or English. Like I’m probably going to drive a truck or something when I get out of school. Join the army or something simple. I’m sure in the army they’re all going to be wondering what an acute angle is. I’m sure I’ll make lots of friends driving my truck because I can diagram some lousy goddamn sentence. And then after school I’m free, right? What’s that mean? I go down to the bowling alley or the shopping mall with my friends. We scope the girls, smoke a little doobidge, maybe a tab of acid every now and then. But that’s not really living, is it? I mean, if that’s living, then excuse me right now. I’ll go out and put a bullet in the old brain pan. But if that’s not all there is, right, well, maybe there’s something I could do a little less radical, like, you know. I don’t mind my life or anything–I’m perfectly willing to give it a try. So what the hell, I figured. I’m sick of school, drugs, this goddamn oppressive house of Ethel’s and all. Maybe it’s time I experimented a little more with my life, took a few chances. So that’s when I decided to become a warlock. To master the satanic arts of black magic. Devil worshiping, for you laymen. I want to master what they call the black arts.”
I moved aside cardboard boxes filled with Marvel and DC Comics, dismembered football and hockey uniforms, baseballs and baseball gloves. Then, behind some crumpled Playboy magazines, I found it.
“It’s all relative,” Rodney said. “Black magic’s no ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than white magic. It’s not like one’s ‘good’ and the other’s ‘evil.’ It all just depends on what side you’re rooting for. In other words, it’s all relative. Black magic can go places white magic can’t, that’s all. Satan’s not any more evil or good than God, he’s just trying to move in on God’s territory, like General Motors or Chanel. Everyone faces competition–that’s what makes the strong stronger. That’s why civilization gets better and better instead of falling apart. I say use what you’ve got in this world, because nobody else is going to give you anything they’ve got. Use what you’ve got, or else the other fucker’s going to use what he’s got on you, and I’m not kidding. I think you hear me, Phillip. I think you know where I’m coming from.”
A Judas Priest album was playing full blast on Rodney’s stereo. I couldn’t make out the lyrics very clearly. It seemed as if they were screaming, Retribution, retribution, retribution, retribution…
“Could you turn that down?” I asked, unlatching the slightly oxidized steel clamps and unfolding the chemistry set atop Rodney’s rolltop desk. I pushed some of Rodney’s soiled paperback books out of my way. Aleister Crowley’s The Book of Law. John Knox’s Satan’s Women: A Guide to the Pentagram. A couple of James Herbert and Stephen King novels. L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.
“I’ve even managed to explain this all to Ethel so even she understands where I’m coming from,” Rodney said. “And Ethel, as we all know, is a stupid cunt.”
“Now,” I said, “how about a little more light?”
21
I COULDN’T JUST go and kill Dad, say with a gun or a knife or a bomb. He couldn’t be obliterated, like propositions or houses. He was far too vast and remote to be assailed by small hands and arms such as mine. No, if I wanted Dad out of the way, then I had to deploy Dad’s strength against himself. I could not conquer, Dad could only succumb. I could not be the agent of Dad’s death, only its engineer.
While I tapped a few intricate crystals of sodium into a beaker, I suggested Rodney turn on his cassette player.
I would have to insinuate the diffuse, inorganic world of chemistry into Dad’s body while Dad wasn’t looking. Rodney put on the Grateful Dead, and I began furiously assembling compounds with which, over succeeding days and weeks, I began dosing Dad’s coffee, cookies, roasts and steaks. Dad always said he and I should go more places together, so I proposed we go everywhere, everywhere at once. We were going to journey into the real scheme of life, Dad and I, into life’s basic molecular stuff. The assemblies of atoms and molecules, that systematic world of electrons that orbited and contextualized mere physics. Appearances, behaviors, properties, symbols and formulae, enumeration and analysis, polymers, fuels, oxides and energy. I was returning Dad to that world where he truly belonged, that fundamental world of basic particles that breathed underneath our realer world of mere events. Meanwhile, in Rodney’s room, the stereo played:
Many rivers to cross,
And I can’t seem to find
My way over . . .
Soon Dad was suffering colonic spasms, flatulence, rashes, dizziness, occasional vomiting, boils, sore throats, hemorrhoids, blurred vision and acne. “I don’t know, sport,” Dad said, one hand resting covertly on his stomach. Mom was still patiently chewing her prawn salad. “I don’t know if I feel like dessert or not.” I had been experimenting with sodium compounds that night. Sodium sulphate in Dad’s mushroom soup. Sodium thiosulphate in Dad’s tandoori shrimp.
“Don’t worry about it, Dad,” I said. “I’ll do the washing up. You get yourself some rest.”
Mom, impressively large now, sat resolutely at her place, eating everything in sight. Once the salad and entrée had vanished, Mom commenced tearing into the sourdo
ugh French bread and margarine.
“I think something’s bothering your father,” Mom said, after Dad went into the living room to lie down. Mom was crunching French bread in her mouth, scraping crumbs from the corners of her mouth with one long fingernail. She was staring off into her private country where our baby was lifting itself onto its hind legs and uttering its first hesitant vocables. “Your father hasn’t been sleeping well,” Mom said. “Sometimes he wakes the baby. Sometimes he’s so restless I can’t sleep, I can’t even relax.” Mom made soothing motions against her stomach. “I may begin asking him to sleep on the living room sofa.” Mom was wiping the doughy center of the bread at her plate until the plate was white and dry like a bone. Then she put the soft, moistened bread into her mouth, a patient, animal expression on her face, complacent but alert.
“I guess you can say I started taking a serious interest in Satan about six months ago,” Rodney said, while I heated random substances in a beaker over a thinly glowing can of Sterno. “But that doesn’t mean Satan hadn’t been important in my thoughts long before, or that I wasn’t in some important way already under his influence even when I was very small, even before I was old enough to talk or read. I think I always knew about Satan, but it was only unconscious knowledge, if you know what I mean. There’s lots of knowledge that’s important in this world, and you don’t necessarily have to be able to explain it for it to be valuable to you personally. I’ve learned a lot of really strange things about myself and the universe around me, Phillip, especially since I’ve been contemplating the powers of darkness and all. In fact, I’ve even traveled back to visit my prenatal existence with the benefit of this really interesting book.” Rodney showed me L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. “Because of this interesting journey into my past, I’ve learned that the very first face I ever knew was Satan’s face. I saw him while I was growing in Ethel’s womb. I know it’s kind of a disgusting thought just thinking Ethel has a womb and all, but there you have it. Satan singled me out even when I was just a batch of simmering molecules. I guess that’s why I’ve always been a rather unpleasant sort of person. It’s not like I ever wanted to be such a pain in the ass–I just couldn’t help myself. It was sort of like my destiny, in a way. What’s really great about this scientology stuff I’ve been reading–this idea that we have all these infinite previous existences and all–is that it doesn’t matter. I mean, it doesn’t really matter who I am now, that I may be a devil worshiper or even worse. Because I might have been a bunch of really nice people in my previous incarnations. Priests and ministers, even. Kings and queens, paupers and dogs. I might have been Sir Francis Drake in a former life. I might even have been Willie Mays.”
“Willie Mays isn’t dead,” I said.
“Yet,” Rodney reminded me.
As I tapped chemicals into beakers, flasks and test tubes, as I scraped pungent growths from the surfaces of petri dishes and damp Wonderbread, Rodney often chattered animatedly like this, filling his room with strange notions and imaginings. There was something fecund about Rodney now, vigorous and irrepressible. Rodney lived and thought and ate and dreamed. He was a different Rodney from the one I had known before, and I must admit that now I liked him better. He seemed more involved in life. He didn’t just wait for things to happen.
One afternoon when I arrived at his room Rodney had erected the collapsible card table and covered it with a somber damask tablecloth. At the center of the tablecloth a white candle burned auspiciously on a white plate. A few of Rodney’s books–Demonology and the Occult and Making the Spirit World Work for YOU–lay haphazardly about on the floor. Three chairs were situated around the table, and Beatrice sat in one of them.
“Hello, Phillip.”
I turned to Rodney. “What’s she doing here?” I asked.
“The spirit world is a very feminine place,” Rodney said, motioning me to sit down. “It’s filled with all sorts of feminine forces or something. We need her to help us reach into the feminine half of the void. Now, does anybody want a Coke before I turn off the lights?”
Beatrice did. Then the room went dark and we joined hands around the table.
“All right,” Rodney said. “I guess we can get started.” He shifted in his seat a few times. A large poster of Aerosmith gazed down meaningfully from Rodney’s wall. The luminous dial of Rodney’s private phone seemed to hum faintly, and Rodney cleared his throat. “So I guess, you know, we’re all gathered here to talk to the spirit world. So we should sit real quiet for a moment and just listen.”
The luminous dial hummed, the large poster gazed. I could still smell the odor of marijuana and cigarettes which Beatrice and Rodney must have shared before my arrival.
“So,” Rodney said, clearing his throat and fidgeting impatiently in his rattling folding chair, “this is sort of the part where we have to get in touch with the cosmic vibrations and all. We’re very spiritual people here, waiting to meet some interesting people out there in the spirit world. I mean, if anybody out there’s listening, we’re looking for a guide, some sort of friendly spirit who’s still tied to the material world in some way, but basically who’s dead already.”
“I heard a throat lozenge clicking about in Beatrice’s mouth. Her hand gave mine a slight, conciliatory squeeze, but she wasn’t looking at me.
“So we’ll just wait here,” Rodney said after a few moments. “We won’t say a word or disturb any of you. We just want to sort of know what you’re all thinking, and if any of our former loved ones are out there, and if there’s anything we can do for you down here on earth. That sort of thing. You know, like maybe we’ll scratch your back, you’ll scratch ours. Then if later like maybe we need anything from you, you know. Well, I think you get the picture. Now, I don’t want to be hassling you and everything, so I’m going to shut up for a while, and just get in tune with your vibrations. OK? So none of us are going to say anything for a while. I really mean it this time.”
I don’t know how long we sat there, but it seemed like hours. Eventually the noisy lozenge dissolved in Beatrice’s mouth–like one of her erotic promises, I thought–and when I peeked covertly out of the corner of my eyes I saw she had fallen asleep. She sat slumped forward slightly in her chair, her tiny pink tongue extruding from her too-thin lips, like the tongue of some sleeping terrier. I wondered if Beatrice dreamed of her long abandonment of me, and if she dreamed it without remorse. Rodney, on the other hand, sat unreflectively alert in his chair, his wrists braced against the flimsy table. His face didn’t flinch, nor his expression waver. I had never seen Rodney so firmly involved in anything before. As my half-open eyes peered into the dark corner of Rodney’s room, I thought I saw something begin to cohere. It was red, and hot, and tiny, like a tiny glowing red eye, a canny wolfish eye. There was a thin ribbon of steam rising from it. Then I detected the odor of sandalwood, and recognized the cone of burning incense in a delicate brass tray on Rodney’s bureau. I wondered then if it mattered, whether a vision had to make itself real in order to achieve spiritual validity, or whether the world’s mundane objects could be significant too, like St. Augustine’s rotting fruit.
To prevent my mind from drifting, I tried to concentrate on the spirit world and the slow, bitter ghosts of the dead and unborn I expected to find there. My active mind, however, kept returning to Beatrice’s damp, muggy palm I held so carefully in my left hand. This warmth had once comforted and consoled me, like light. There was a special spiritual electricity here which I had once considered private and inexpressible, but which I now considered diffuse, conglomerate and altogether human, like Southern California Edison or the Department of Water and Power. This warmth could sleep and live without me, without even thinking of me. It could be my warmth, but then someday it could be somebody else’s warmth too. Somebody else’s hand might hold it, somebody else might kiss it with their lips. It could go away from me and live in its own house. Warmth was a spiritual force too, I realized then. Ghosts often exis
t even in the bodies of people we love.
Rodney began to hum. A low, Gregorian, extensive sort of hum that expanded in the room like warm air or rumors. Until now I had been squinting, but as my eyes began to relax I closed them. The darkness under my eyelids was slightly phosphorescent. With my eyes closed and my mind alert, the world made more sense. Warmth, light, motion, mass, gravity, weight, space and sound. These were all around me, but sometimes I could not see or sense them because the world got in my way, sometimes even the thickness and delirium of my own body. Rodney hummed, and Beatrice’s soft hand nestled in mine like some submarine creature, convoluted and brainless, a mass of uncomprehending nerve and muscle. I could travel away through worlds of weight and sound, but only with this sleeping hand to guide me back again. The world of sensation was very dim, and Rodney’s humming voice trembled everywhere like loose wallpaper. Dark shapes turned around me, and I descended through notched cavernous chambers of impacted weight and mass. Sound resided everywhere, but mass resided only in strategic places, waiting for its opportunity to influence human events. Light always resided somewhere other than where it was. I traveled without body or form. I was just an envelope of heat and sensation, diffused by the radiant warmth of other hands and bodies. You couldn’t make out faces or landscapes down here. You could only detect the irreducible heart of things, things like light, and motion, and weight, and mass, and sound.
“Hey!”
Someone shook my shoulder. I opened my eyes.
“Hey, did you feel anything? I think I started to feel something.”
All the lights were on. Rodney stood over me, a freshly lit cigarette smoldering in his hand. He had removed his T-shirt to reveal the green tattoo of a dragon uncurling around his pale navel. Rodney’s chest was smooth, muscled and hairless.
“Didn’t you feel something there at the end? Not a voice, exactly. It was like we were slipping, like we were getting through somewhere.”
The History of Luminous Motion Page 13