Sometimes I forgot how old Crater was, not that I knew exactly — probably a little over twice my age, call it forty or so. He sometimes made offhand comments about seeing punk bands in London and that must have been way back, prehistoric times. Me and him were barely even born in the same century. But he knew a lot of things, and he was funny, and sexy for an old guy, and never condescending, which is the one thing I can’t stand.
“Iceland itself doesn’t matter, but there’s going to be a breach in there.” Crater had that far–off look in his eyes, like he was seeing through time and space, or maybe like he was stoned. “There was almost a breach in the same location back in ’07, that’s why the powers that be really closed the place. They made some some bullshit excuse about how the place was venting dangerous levels of ammonia from the cooling system and it was too expensive to fix, but that’s just the cover story. Somebody in city government was clued–in, there’s usually one guy who knows what’s really happening underneath the skin of the world, so he brought in some people to seal the breach — fucking posers from Europe, all crystal balls and amulets and magic words — but they did a shitty job, like wallpapering over a hole instead of filling it in. I’m pretty sure their half–assed ritual actually triggered the Alum Rock earthquake.”
Sometimes I didn’t know what Crater was talking about, and this was one of those times, but I kept drinking and listening.
“Anyway, all the charts, all the stones, the bells and books and candles, everything I’ve got tells me there’s going to be another breach, in the same spot. But nobody else realizes it, I don’t think — nobody’s paying attention anymore. They think the site is stable, and anyway, it looks like a short–duration breach, maybe just a few hours of accessibility from this side.”
“You’re saying Iceland is going to… what? Turn into a doorway to Hell?”
“It’s not Hell. Or Fairyland either. Or Summerland or Abaddon or anything else you’ve heard of, or else it’s all those places. Or those places are just neighborhoods there, good parts of town and bad parts of town. It’s just… the Other Place.”
“We’re still talking about the land of demons and fairies and stuff though.”
He shrugged. “Demons are denizens of the Other Place who breach and possess people. Fairies are… more subtle. Sometimes they seduce, sometimes they steal people away overtly, and sometimes they make trades where they always get the better end of the bargain — demons do that last one too. But demons, fairies, whatever you call them, they’re all takers.” Suddenly he grinned, and he looked younger, young enough to be my older brother instead of my dad. “But if you’re smart you can take something from them. It’s been a long time since I’ve wriggled through a breach. I’m ready to do it again.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a great party, for one thing. The denizens of the Other Place get intoxicated by the connection to our world, I think. You can’t even really call it a party — it’s a revel. It’s primal. There are drugs you can’t imagine, things made for alien physiologies, but they have effects on humans you can’t believe. And the wine, or what you might as well call wine… How old do you think I am, Aerin?”
My real name’s Stephanie, but I changed it when I went goth for a while in high school and it stuck, sort of, in certain circles. (My family still calls me Steffie. They’re incorrigible.) “Like, a hundred?”
He smiled again and the lines around his eyes crinkled. “You’re not nearly as far off as you think, love. I turned seventy last month.”
I made a noise, like a snort. No way he was that old. He didn’t even exercise, he just smoked weed and drank whisky and read books and talked all day. Plus I could handle sleeping with a forty year old, call it life experience for my art, but seventy?
“I don’t feel it,” he said. “My body’s still aging, but slowly. I can’t be sure, but I think it’s because I had one glass of wine, stolen from a revel I stumbled upon in the middle of a field — in the middle of nowhere — hours outside London. I was on a road trip with some assholes and we had a fight and they shoved me out of the van and I just started walking in the pissing rain, no idea where I was, or where I was going. And then I saw these… tents, like white silk pavilions, but they weren’t made of cloth, they were made of beams of moonlight, or spiderwebs, but somehow they kept the rain off. And there were lanterns, but when you looked closer they were just floating balls of luminous gas. I thought it was a costume party, at first, but… no costume is that good.” He ran a hand through his short hair, which was barely sprinkled with gray. “I got a drink, and it tasted like summer rain and honey and embalming fluid. I snorted something blue and crystalline a woman offered me, except she wasn’t a woman, she was mostly something like a salamander crossed with a crystal chandelier, except I didn’t notice that at first. Just being at the party was like being on hallucinogens anyway, the music played inside my head and the bass line followed the throb of my heartbeat, and after I took the drugs it got weirder… people kept beckoning me, and then someone else started shouting at me, and a couple of people — except they weren’t people — started fighting, and I realize they were fighting over me, who got to keep me. Or maybe they said ‘eat’ me. So while they were distracted I stumbled off, and I fell asleep somewhere. I woke up beneath an overpass in Manchester with a hangover and a nosebleed, and I swear I puked up some gold coins, except after a few minutes they turned into leaves. The weirdest thing was? I’d been gone for two weeks, according to all the clocks and calendars in this world. Time isn’t the same for them, that much of the old stories is true. Ever since that party I’ve been… quasi–immortal. And interested in this kind of thing. Which is why I became a student of —”
“The mystic whatever, yeah, I get it. That’s a good story. Almost as good as the one where you went caving and found artifacts from a lost race and a monster spoke to you from a hole in the ground and knew the name of your childhood imaginary friend.”
“That’s not nearly as good a story,” Crater said. “That thing barely even spoke English. So anyway. Want to come to the revel with me? Maybe become immortal, or the next best thing? My charts say… two months, exactly, from today, there’ll be a crack between our world and theirs. Or not a crack exactly, more of an overlap. I call it a ‘breach’ because it’s like what a whale does, when it jumps out of the water, and there’s a moment when part of it is in the air and part is underwater — when it’s a creature of both worlds. That’s what the Other Place does: it breaches into our world. You should come. It’s a once–in–a–lifetime kind of thing. Unless your life’s as long as mine.”
“Fine, I’ll go.” I figured he was having me on, but I assumed he was going to take me to some kind of secret party in the abandoned building, people taking advantage of the space before it got torn down or turned into condos or a sporting goods store or something. Sure, he’d told me more outlandish things, and shown me one or two things I couldn’t explain, but a breach? “What should I wear?”
He laughed. “Nothing too sparkly. They’re attracted to bright things, and never forget, we’re crashing their party.” Suddenly his expression went serious. “And in the next couple of months, especially in the last couple of weeks before the breach… be careful. You know how earthquakes have foreshocks and aftershocks, tremors that happen around the big quake? Breaches can be like that. Stuff can get… weird, for a little while. Things fall from the sky. Guys walk into fields and vanish in full view of their friends, nothing left but their boots.”
“I’ll lace my boots real tight and carry an umbrella.” He laughed, and we said our farewells not long after.
As near as I can figure, I was sitting bored in a sociology lecture the next morning when Crater got swallowed by the sinkhole.
§
I heard about it on campus, from a couple of old professors talking on a bench while I walked by — one said “Crater” and “Couldn’t recover his body” and I stopped and said, “Wait, what happened to C
rater?” figuring there couldn’t be too many people with that name.
The profs were both gray–haired, one male, one female, with identical ponytails, onetime hippies turned academics living the tenured dream at UC Berkeley. “Did you know him, young lady?”
I nodded. “We hang out sometimes, yeah, he was teaching me about...”
“Magic?” the other one said, and clucked his tongue. “He used to get in trouble when he taught here, showing off his sleight of hand and reading the Tarot, getting… overly friendly with the undergrads.”
I’d had no idea Crater ever taught anything, much less at Berkeley. He lived in a tiny apartment in the thick of student housing, even though he wasn’t a student, except, he said, “a student of the arcane.” He’d never pulled a quarter from behind my ear or shown me a Tarot deck, either. I wanted to say, “It wasn’t like that, I practically picked him up,” but that wasn’t the important thing.
“It sounded like you said something about his body.” I crossed my arms and looked down on them as sternly as I could, pretty funny I guess coming from an eighteen year old in a long skirt and silver bracelets.
“I’m so sorry, dear. There was a terrible accident. A sinkhole opened up right underneath him while he was walking downtown. The sidewalk just collapsed, and he dropped straight down. There were witnesses, and they called for help right away, but the rescue personnel couldn’t even find the bottom of the hole, and then there was another subsidence and the sides of the hole collapsed, filling it in again...” She shook her head. “If you give me your contact information I can let you know if there’s a service, or —”
I just backed away. “No, that’s okay.” I didn’t want to go to his funeral, or I guess it would be a memorial, with no body to bury. I’d never had anyone close to me die before — a great–uncle I barely knew, that was it. Certainly no one I’d slept with had died before.
As I hurried away, I heard one of the oldsters on the bench say, “Crater was a great teacher, despite everything. I remember when he taught my Intro to Anthropology class...”
§
The sinkhole opened on Shattuck Ave., the main street that runs through downtown (just a couple of blocks off Milvia St., where Iceland sits in all its graffitied glory). Crater hadn’t vanished in the heart of downtown, around the movie theaters and the library and pubs and restaurants and shops, but several blocks south, where it was mostly just the self–storage place and old folks’ homes and car lots.
I went to see the hole, which was as wide as the whole sidewalk, though by then it was more a shallow indentation partially filled with rubble. I figured in a day or two the city would fill it the rest of the way in, level it off, and pour concrete over it. An unmarked grave for Crater. Maybe if I came over when the cement was wet I could draw an upside–down pentagram there, or his birth and death dates, though for his birth date I’d have to put a row of question marks.
The hole was blocked off with chained–together sawhorses, with a sprinkling of orange cones around the perimeter, the whole thing wrapped up with yellow police tape like too much ribbon on a gift wrapped by a child. I couldn’t get too close, not that I wanted to. None of it made sense. How had he disappeared? Weren’t there pipes under the sidewalk to snag him when he fell? Hell, a train tunnel ran underneath Shattuck, though I wasn’t sure if it went under exactly that spot. How had he just disappeared? I know the Bay Area is earthquake country and the ground isn’t as solid as it seems, but, damn.
Something glittered in the weeds by the sidewalk, and I squatted down to look. At first I thought they were gold coins, but they turned out to be crinkly leaves cut out of gold–colored foil or something. There was a broken wineglass beside the leaves, the cup part still whole, the stem broken off beside it. I picked up the cup and sniffed. It smelled like antifreeze and pickle juice.
Crater had warned me. Foreshocks, and aftershocks. I thought about taking the leaves or the glass fragments home but I just left them beside his grave.
§
Maybe I should have gone to his memorial, but I didn’t want to hear other people talk about Crater. He was fixed in my mind in a certain way and I didn’t want that to change. He was this funny, smart, dirty old man, who seemed pretty wise but was probably at least half full of shit, and he always treated me with respect and listened to me (instead of just pretending to listen to me so I’d be more inclined to take my pants off, which naturally made me even more inclined to take my pants off for a while), and even though he mooched my food a lot he always had great weed. And he did show me some impossible things, which I assumed were tricks at the time, but maybe they were more. I could hardly believe the people at the memorial would really be his friends — not his real friends. He said all his real friends were dead. He said that’s why he was making friends with me: because I was young enough maybe he wouldn’t outlive me.
And while I had a lot of people I hung out with, people I knew from class and my housemates and all, in a way Crater was the only real friend I’d made since I moved across the country to go to college at Cal.
Look, I’m not stupid. Older guy, younger girl, okay, I’ve read books, I’ve seen movies, I’ve got friends. And maybe it started out that way — I was a way for him to scratch an itch or feel young or powerful or whatever. But I got something out of it, too, and after the sex parts stopped, the other parts got better, and we went from using each other to meaning something to each other.
So I couldn’t just let him die without doing something to mark his passage.
§
One time laying together in his narrow bed, after we’d known each other for a month and been fucking for three weeks and five days (with about three more weeks to go), Crater stroked my bare shoulder and said, “What is it you want?”
I said something like, “I wouldn’t mind a cigarette.”
He chuckled, but it wasn’t a real laugh, it was being nice to the college girl who’d decided to sleep with you, so you’d better humor her. “No, really. If you want to learn magic, you need a reason. A smart man once wrote that magic is the art of getting results, but if you don’t have any results in mind… unfocused power is dangerous.”
“What do you want?” I countered.
“To live forever, and feel good doing it,” he said. “What about you?”
“I don’t even know what I’m majoring in yet, Crater.” His first name was Archibald, which sounded too old–fashioned to say out loud, but Archie sounded too young and dumb to fit him, so mostly people stuck with his last name. “You can’t ask me what I want in some big universal sense.”
“When you figure it out, let me know. We’ll work out how to help you get it.”
Of course I did know what I wanted. I wanted to be a poet. Maybe every girl — especially those with a goth phase — writes poetry, but I’d always been serious about it. I studied. I went to readings whenever I could, to listen to other poets, who were mostly terrible but sometimes sublime. I wrote a lot and tore most of it up. I knew more about scansion and lift and enjambment than I’d ever let anybody realize.
Sometimes I thought I was pretty good at writing, and I’d include some of my poems here, except fuck you, I don’t have to prove anything to you. Besides, pretty good wasn’t nearly good enough. I wanted to write something that would turn people inside out and make them question the shape of the lives, the way poems by Ellen Bass or Adrienne Rich or Nikky Finney did to me. I wanted to see the world clearly and convey that clarity to others. Or else I wanted to see a different world: to have visions, and see trees filled with angels, the way William Blake did. Part of sleeping with Crater was thinking I needed to fill up my life with more experiences so I could have things to write about. Part of my interest in magic — or magick or magyk or whatever — was wanting to penetrate the ordinariness of this world to find a brighter world beyond.
I tried to write a bunch of poems about Crater after he died but mostly I just threw them away, and in the weeks that followed I visite
d the bit of sidewalk where he’d been buried (it looked like the rest of the sidewalk again, except the concrete was newer and cleaner) and stood there like a moron and talked to him. Somebody had cleaned up the broken glass and leaves. Or else they’d turned into regular leaves, because they were bits of the Other Place that had breached into our world and couldn’t last, or something. I didn’t really believe that, but I didn’t not believe it, either. (Like Walt Whitman pretty much wrote: Do I contradict myself? So the fuck what. I contain multitudes.)
§
I bought an actual wall calendar (I know, who does that? It’s not like I don’t have a phone) and hung it on my wall and circled the date Crater had said there was going to be a breach at Iceland. I didn’t know what I was going to do that night, except I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to hang out in my apartment and watch bad horror movies with my housemates. The night was just a week before the end of my freshman year, and I had important final exams to study for, but there’s important and there’s important, and maybe I’m not that old or wise but I’m old enough to know the difference.
When the night came I dressed all in black, dark pants and hiking boots and a black shirt and a black hoodie. I remembered some stuff Crater told me, so I wore the shirt inside–out under the hoodie to confuse “second sight,” whatever that means, and I carried seven small stones he’d given me in my pocket. He claimed the rocks were from all seven continents, and that they acted as a “locative diffuser,” meaning they’d make me harder to track by magic. (When I told him I didn’t believe you could track things by magic, he got a map and a piece of string and a chunk of lodestone and did a little ritual, and after that he led me to the place on campus where I’d lost my ID a week before, stuck right there half–underneath a log in the eucalyptus grove. We’d done some serious making out in that grove. The smell of eucalyptus still makes me a little hot, even all these years later.)
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