by Nick Mamatas
Chelsea said it again, that line from the Gnostic Mass: “O Lion and O Serpent that destroy the destroyer, be mighty among us!” And my father just laughed. That cruel laugh. The wind picked up and sent the woods talking.
Maybe she should have said that line a third time, and offered her breasts to my father, the priest. “You promised,” Chelsea shouted. “You said! I shaved my fucking head for this. I had to deal with your crazy mother to get us to this point too. Who the hell brings their mother to a thing like this? What were you thinking?”
“Oh, you got a better plan for money than her?” my father said. And like that, the coiling dark dissipated. He was no magus; he was just another low-level grifter looking to cash in on an old lady’s Social Security. And not a very smart one, because he brought her around while he contrived to fuck a teenage girl who dressed just like his own daughter. “Forget it, bitch,” he said. “Nothing’s gonna happen now. You’re just shouting at a big old empty universe full of shit, you understand? Do you?”
And there Dad was, wise again. The universe is empty, with nothing left to grind against but itself. What remains is Qliphoth, those rotten poison husks. Waste products of creation. Cosmic shit.
Chelsea and Dad were both completely wrapped up in one another, able even to stand naked in the autumn cold, fuming and steaming and screaming at one another without noticing me a few yards away, on the other side of a shattered wall. I could have walked between them and waved hello and they wouldn’t have perceived me. That was good. They didn’t want me, and they only wanted Grandma for her money. But there was something else they wanted. I lifted my feet carefully, walking backward as best I could in the dark and mud. Whatever they wanted, I wanted it too. And I’d trade Grandma back to them for it if need be.
Grandma had made it to the lip of the ridge by the time I got back up to it. She was utterly covered in filth, and that made the decision for me—we’d go back to the apartment, keep the lights off, and hope the police didn’t come sniffing around for a day or two. She looked up at me and smiled and said a name. Not Dawn.
“Chelsea.” And she smiled at me.
16.
Grandma’s dementia wasn’t so far gone that I had to bathe her regularly. Normally, yelling at her to go take a shower would work. She had never even had a broken hip. But that night she was a wreck. I put her in the back of the car, and she managed to flail about so much that I could hardly see out the rear window, it was so streaked with mud. I stayed off Nesconse Highway as much as possible, to avoid the cops, and let her burn herself out with the yelling for a doctor—“I can’t breathe! You’re trying to kill me!”—and for Chelsea—“Sweet, sweet Chelsea, why are you treating me like this all of a sudden?”—before bringing her upstairs. Then she was pliable enough to manhandle into the tub and scrub clean. Her body was a torn and deflated balloon; it made me want to die.
I was never straight edge. It always seemed cultish and stupid—not like Thelema or Trotskyism, she said ironically to herself. I just never drank much because of Dad, and thanks to my late poverty. If there was ever a time for a beer and some television, this was it. Bernstein would have snorted. He always said that TV was just like Buddhist meditation, except that the focus was on samsara. It drained the Will, and replaced it with bourgeois propaganda via teletrancing. Grandma couldn’t afford cable, but there was one beer left, and so it and a freshman DJ on WUSB stammering her way through a 3–6 a.m. shift kept me company.
So, Bernstein and my father had been school chums. My father had some knowledge of the occult, probably thanks to Bernstein and old Black Sabbath LPs. Dad had never really fit in with the grownups on the block, I realized now. It’s actually hard to get laid off from a defense contractor—well, until this summer. With the deformed and degenerated workers’ states on the verge of full capitalist restoration, the bourgeoisie are already talking about a “peace dividend,” as though they wouldn’t just find some other enemies to target. But all Long Island is fearful now. What if nuclear war isn’t inevitable? How are we going to pay down the mortgages on our homes? That’s the logic of the middle class.
My father was always just smart enough to see through the bullshit, but not smart enough to do anything about it. He had been an engineer, and to hear him tell it he was a good one. But engineers are never any good at working with people, so he was always being outmaneuvered, blowing up at his bosses, and getting shitcanned.
“Even with science, it’s all about sucking cock,” he had told me, with my mother dying in the hospital bed between us. I was visiting, he had just stormed in, his tie in disarray. “Cock!”
“Fired again?” I said, softly as possible, willing him to quiet down. Mother was on a morphine drip at this point, so she was feeling no pain.
“Fuck it, Dawn. Mama's more tumor than woman,” he said. He leaned down and spoke into her mouth. “You win, you fucking cells. No more job, no more insurance. Enjoy your last meal, tumors!” He put his head into his palms. “Laid off again. I did all the work, solved all the problems. The stellar-inertial guidance system works thanks to me; otherwise our fucking missiles couldn’t hit the ocean! But some stockholder wanted his nephew to have a job, and . . .”
“Dad, you have to—”
“What?” He looked up at me. There was no sadness in his eyes, and not even rage. Just pure terror. “Get another job? Yeah, I can do that. I’ll just go down to Sperry . . . Oh wait, there’s no more Sperry. Unisys.” He hissed that last word. “Except,” more hissing, “they’re leaving the island.”
“So, let’s leave the island!” I said, though of course Mom couldn’t survive any move. She couldn’t survive at all.
“We are staying here!” he said. And he was right. Mom died soon enough, and he went crazy.
And now, Dad had apparently found Chelsea somewhere, convinced her to adopt my look, and was fucking her as well as his regular crackhead girlfriend. She called the pigs on me in the hope of giving Dad a chance to kidnap Grandma. Chelsea had some big dreams of magick, but crack had long ago ruined Dad’s Will, to the extent that he ever had any.
Did Dad kill Bernstein? Did Chelsea? Why? Certainly not for money. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bernstein had been loaded, but a clever Marxist like him would know all the capitalist tricks—trust funds and Swiss bank accounts, beachfront property on islands just big enough for a post-colonial flag, shares in thoroughbred horses. The instruments of capital proles like me only ever hear about thanks to stuffy, snooty characters on television sitcoms.
Once upon a time Dad would use the stars to chart the course of world events—that is, he designed celestial guidance systems that sent missiles to rain down fire and death upon the masses who dared cross his masters. It was almost like magick. Now he’s just another crackhead, and Chelsea was stupid enough to go along with whatever schemes come out of his dead gap-toothed mouth. The plan might have not been much more than “Get Dawn out of the way, grab Mama, fuck in the ruins, then move into the apartment and wait till the first of the month for the Social Security check.” But they wouldn’t be fucking in Bernstein’s house, or be interested at all in him, without somehow having something to do with his death. I surely would have noticed my own father, who was never subtle, sniffing around Bernstein, and Bernstein would have said something.
No, he wouldn’t have. He never explained that he had known my father, and my grandmother, back when he was a high school kid whose abiding interests were Black Sabbath, model airplane glue, and painting. Yes, the Tower painting was important too somehow. The situation was too much, the time so late, the—
No. Not right. I am a fucking genius. What was required was a change in perspective. The situation was extremely simple. There were five billion people on Earth, but only a minute number of possible suspects. And it wasn’t late; it was early. The sun was just a few hours from rising. I was spending too much time and energy trying to outguess a moron and a psychopath, and not nearly enough focusing on my goal. I turned off the TV. I
got up and poured the rest of the beer down the kitchen sink.
Dharana yoga is the meditation of concentration, one I was never very good at. Think of a red triangle. That’s it. It’s one of the four hardest things in the world. One thinks of a red triangle, then of the person who told them to think of a red triangle. Of a red triangle, then of a slice of pizza. Of a red triangle, then of gravity’s pull tugging one’s ass toward the center of the earth. Of a red triangle, and how hard it is to keep thinking of a red triangle. Of a red triangle, and of the old canard that it’s impossible not to think of a white horse on command. And that’s the first several seconds.
Bernstein smiled at me once—a wide smile, that revealed a dead, gray molar—and told me that the secret was to actually think of a five-pointed red star. The red star of the working class ascendant. The five points representing the five fingers of the worker’s hand, through which all wealth is created. The five points representing the five continents, the whole wide world that the worker has to gain.
“Seven continents,” I said.
Bernstein scowled. “What’s a continent and what isn’t is a matter of cultural and ideological imperatives—much of the world counts only five continents. Here in the US we keep seven, because of racist antipathy toward Latin America, and because of colonial designs on Antarctica. Think of the Olympic flag. Another symbol. Five rings for five continents.”
“Oh,” I said. Another factoid to file away.
“Back to the red star. The red for militant struggle—as opposed to the yellow hammer and sickle that represented labor at peace. Peace that floats in a sea of red blood,” Bernstein said.
“That sounds like a lot to think about,” I’d said. “Isn’t the idea to think of one arbitrary thing?”
“There are no arbitrary things. Exoterically, sure. Logos—” then he stopped, and laughed, and started again. “Logos are not logos,” Bernstein said, interrupting himself, saying logos with a soft g, like the Greek word. “See, there’s one now. Yes, logos are just often arbitrary-seeming symbols, but there are layers of esoteric truth in every curve and corner of a design. Draw a circle in the sand around a lone rock and someone will worship it. What is it the Firesign Theatre said? ‘There’s a seeker born every minute.’ ”
I remembered rolling my eyes. “Now you’re just babbling.”
“Am I?”
“Well . . . oh, of course.” Then I got it. Another lesson from the magus, this one via negative example. “All those were your ‘breaks’—what you found yourself thinking of instead of thinking of a red triangle. A red star, I mean.”
Bernstein held his smile, which made me melt. He usually just flashed a smile, and snickered like that old cartoon dog Muttley. “And I had a realization. The red star is five red triangles. It was like a factory speed-up. I got down in twenty percent of the time most seekers do.” Then he laughed at his own joke.
So I sat and thought of a red triangle, then my mind drifted back to Bernstein and the conversation. So I decided to move on to the red star, which brought me to mind of Tiananmen Square, and the victory of the bureaucracy over the incipient revolutionaries back in the summer. What would happen now about capitalist counterrevolution? In twenty years, China would be another Japan. And the Eastern bloc, and glasnost, what would become of the degenerated and deformed workers’ states of Europe? The whole of the epoch filled my head. Everything was in a state of collapse: my own life, the entire system of the world.
I caught my breath, and almost got up to stick my head into the sink and lick the beer droplets left on the drain. But then I realized what I needed to meditate on. The Tower painting. More complex than a red triangle, but that would make it easier. There was always more tower to envision, always more collapse to embrace. When a tower collapses, all of it falls to the earth, eventually. Flying, screaming people, the great clouds of dust that shoot into the air and cover the sun, the flames that rise high and burn out—we’re all ultimately headed straight down. I would have gone to the car to get it, but I was too exhausted. If Dad, or whoever, swiped it again, they could have it and sell it. I concentrated on the painting till every stroke was tattooed on my brain. I owned it now; it was mine, forever.
17.
When the going gets tough, the tough go punk. The Abyssal Eyeballs were playing that night. A part of me realized that it would be just too neat if Chelsea appeared at the show, perhaps with my father or Greg in tow. Or if Aram and Karen showed up again, with a name and phone number for the person who wanted the Tower painting. At the same time, what else could possibly happen?
The day was long. Grandma was covered in bruises and whimpering in pain like a dying puppy. I had to carry her to the bathroom and then back to bed. She wouldn’t sleep, or eat, robbing me of my occasional standby of slipping her an over-the-counter antihistamine crushed up in a jelly sandwich. She didn’t eat peanut butter anymore—dentures, you know.
“What happened? What happened?” Grandma kept saying. “Where’s Billy? I lost Billy in the woods.” She asked me, “But you were there. You must know where Billy got off to. Why don’t you tell me?” She cried till her tear ducts dried out, and gulped water like a child.
“Chelsea . . .” She called me Chelsea. I almost slapped her right in the mouth. “You have to understand something about Billy. He doesn’t always think clearly. Sometimes he says things that, at the time, he thinks he will do, but then doesn’t do it.”
“I know, Grandma,” I said.
“I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t know what I did wrong. He was a nice boy, a good boy. Always very attentive. It was when he got married and had that baby that something turned in him. It was like he expected to be a teenager forever, Chelsea. No wonder he likes you so much.”
I doubted that there was any percentage in pretending to be Chelsea, but there’s even less in arguing with dementia. “Does he ever talk about me?” I tried.
“Oh yes, all the time,” Grandma said. I knew that was a delusion. Grandma hadn’t said more than a hundred words to my father in months. Grandma continued,. “He says you’re very smart and do well in school, and that he met you at Good Read Book Stop, and that’s how he knew how smart you were.”
I supposed it was possible that the bookstore could be a lead. What else did I know about Chelsea? She was fucking my father. She owned, or had access to, a Volvo. I hadn’t known her in school, or even seen her around, so she was probably from the Village, not Port Jefferson Station—different school districts. Probably some rich bitch out for a few thrills. Maybe she’d been to the bookstore.
Grandma was telling me a story about how smart I was. How an essay I wrote was published in the elementary school newsletter back when I was in second grade. No wonder my father made his teenage girlfriend shave her head so he could fuck a girl who looked just like me. He surely missed me very much. Grandma’s story ended, “And then Dawn brought home the newsletter and said that she had her essay in it. And that’s how I knew she was so smart. One time in second grade . . .” She looped through the story again in its entirety.
“We’re going downtown,” I announced suddenly. Grandma was startled. Her lip started trembling. “No arguments. Billy lives downtown, don't you know?” I couldn’t leave Grandma alone; who knows whom she’d let into the house while I was out. She fussed, but was interested. I got her into her housecoat and packed a bag. I told her it was in case we got lost, which she was addled enough to believe. I locked up the apartment as securely as I could and drove right to St. Charles Hospital. I walked her into the ER, and she followed silently until she saw the check-in window.
“What are we doing here?” she whispered to me.
“You’re covered in bruises, Grandma,” I said. “Look at your arms!” They were well marked from last night’s exertions and a couple of days of rough living in squats and who knew where else. Then I whispered, “I think Billy knows who did it. I’ll find him and bring him here. You just stay here, and let the doctors take ca
re of you.” For a second I thought she might begin screaming, and bring the orderlies down on us. Then I’d have to fill out forms, answer questions about her physical condition, perhaps submit to a police interrogation. But she was tired, and had burnt herself out this morning. I sat her down, handed her her bag, and said I was going to get a doctor. Instead, I left. On the way out I passed an orderly and asked for the chapel, telling him that I wanted to light a candle for my grandmother, at whom I pointed. Grandma even waved to me. Of course, I looked just like the bride of Satan, so the kid mostly just stammered and blinked before waving his arm in the direction of the chapel. I asked him to keep an eye on her, and he shrugged and said he would. I whispered that I thought she had tried to commit suicide—instant bump-up on triage that way—and split.
I didn’t know what I expected to find at Good Read, but I had little to do before the Abyssal Eyeballs show, which was being held in a secret location. Sounded promising. Before Bernstein, Good Read was my education in both magick and Marxism. It’s a used and antiquarian bookstore, the sort of place where one could buy a sack of paperback horror novels for a dollar, or spend five thousand bucks on a signed first edition Nabokov. Cool stuff, and a great way to peer into the collective psyche of the older generation and the way they used to live, and think, before they all sold out and went to work for Grumman or the state.
The section on Marxism and anarchism was a mishmash of old party pamphlets—Maoists of various stripes, mostly, as the specter of a black boyfriend was most offensive to parents back in the sixties—anti-Communist exposés from the fifties, a lot of stuff on economic calculation and planning, anarchist classics, and some scholarly material. But it was enough for me. The occult section was similarly a dog’s breakfast: UFO abduction stories, Seth books, Edgar Cayce, some pagan junk, and some actually cool stuff. Maybe Satanic boyfriends were even more fearsome a generation ago. My first ever occult book was the hysterical The Magick of Chant-O-Matics by Raymond Buckland. One of the chants literally went, in part, “Now, now, now / money, money, money!” Funny, my father used to mutter exactly that, all the time, under his breath.