The Worm in Every Heart

by Gemma Files

  “Listen! Oh, now you have drawn near to hearkening—your spit, I take it, I eat it; your body, I take it, I eat it; your flesh, I take it, I eat it; your heart, I take it, I eat it. O Ancient Ones, this man’s soul has come to rest at the edge of my body. You are to lay hold to it, and never to let it go, until I indicate otherwise. Bind him with black threads and let him roam restless, never thinking upon any other place or person.”

  The spells don’t change. They never change. And that’s because, quite frankly—

  “Bring him to me, and me to him. Bring us both together.”

  —they never really have to.

  Already, I felt myself stirring, sleepily. Jerking awake. Arching to meet those five red fingers halfway.

  Purple no-halo raising the hairs on the backs of my forearms, then slipping down to slime my palms with eerie phosphorescence; my wards holding fast, as ever, against the gathering funnel of Power forming outside the circle’s rim. My Art wrapping ‘round me like a cold static cocoon, sparking and twinging. A dull scribble of bio-electricity, followed by a wash of gooseflesh. Nothing natural. All as it should be.

  Until: Something, somewhere, snapped.

  The mirror cracked across, images emptied. The funnel suddenly slack as a rubber band, then blown away in a single breath-slim stain—dispersed like ectoplasm against a strung thread, or brains on a brick wall. Just gone, baby, gone.

  Which was odd, granted—annoying, definitely; left alone and aroused once more, laid open for any port in a hormonal storm. Even sort of intriguing, for all that I wasn’t exactly all that interested in being intrigued right now, this very minute. I mean, damn.

  But no, I wasn’t scared. Not even then. Why should I be?

  I sat back on my heels, suddenly remembering how I’d once met my former aunt on the street once, just after Pride, arm still in Ed’s, my tongue still rummaging around in the dark of his mouth. How she’d clicked her teeth at me, spat on the sidewalk between us, and called me a banana. How Ed had blanched, then turned red; how I’d just laughed, amazed she even knew the term.

  And how I couldn’t understand, later on, why he was still so upset—about the fact that I hadn’t been upset at all.

  Because that’s how things go, when you’re shadowless: How trouble slides away from you, finding no purchase on your immaculate incompleteness. How the only thing you can hear, most days and nights, is the bright and seductive call of your own Power—your Art, your Practice. How it lures and pulls you, draws you like a static charge, singing: Follow, follow, follow.

  And how I do, inevitably—without fail—even at the cost of anything and everything in my way. Like the lack of a shadow follows a black hole sun.

  This is probably worth looking at, sometime, I thought. Got the words wrong, maybe, one of the symbols; have to do a little research, re-consecrate my tools, re-examine my methods. All that.

  (Sometime.)

  But . . .

  . . . not tonight.

  * * *

  An hour later, I swerved up Church Street, heading straight for the Khyber. Wednesday was Fetish Night, and though nothing I had on was particularly appropriate, I knew a brief flirtation with Vic the bouncer would probably get me in anyway. The street glittered, febrile with windchill, unfolding itself in a series of pointilescent flashes: Bar doorways leaking black light and Abba; a muraled restaurant wall sugared with frost; parks and alleyways choked with unseasonably-dressed chain-smokers, shivering and snide, almost too cold to cruise.

  Past the bar and out through the musically segregated dance-floor (the Smiths vs. Traci Lords, standing room only), I finally found my old RTA party partner Gil Wycliffe—now head of creative design for Quadrant Leather—strapped face-down over a vaulting horse in one of the club’s back rooms, getting his bare ass beaten red and raw by some all-purpose Daddy in a Sam Browne belt and a fetching pair of studded vinyl chaps. The paddle being used looked like one of Gil’s own creations; it had a crack like a long-range rifle-shot, and left a diamond-shaped pattern of welts behind that made his buttocks glow as patchily as underdone steaks.

  I must admit that I’ve never quite understood the appeal of sadomasochism, for all that “they”—those traditionally unspecified (though probably Caucasian) arbiters of societal lore—would probably like to credit me with some kind of genetic yearning toward pain and suffering for fun and pleasure, just because the whole concept supposedly originated in the Mysterious East: The Delight Of The Razor, the Death Of The Thousand And One Cuts. All that stale old Sax Rohmer/James Bond bullshit.

  Then again, I guess there’s no particular reason anyone else really has to “get” it, unless they are a masochist. Or a sadist.

  The Daddy paused for a half-second between licks, catching my eye in open invitation; I signed disinterest, leaned back against the wall to wait this little scene out, let my gaze wander.

  And there he was.

  First a mere lithe flicker between gyrating bodies, then a half-remembered set of lines and angles, gilded with mounting heat: Vague reflections off a high, flat cheekbone, a wryly gentle mouth, a bent and pliant neck. That whole lambent outline—so neat, so trim, so invitingly indefinite. It was my Bloor mystery man himself, swaying out there at the very heart of the crowd. Head back, body loose. Shaking and burning in the strobelights’ glare.

  Oh, waaah.

  Every inch of me sprang awake at the sight, skin suddenly acrawl with possibilities.

  The way he stood. The way he moved. The sheer, oddly familiar glamour of him was an almost physical thing, even to the cut and cling of his all-black outfit—though I couldn’t have described its components if you’d asked me to, I somehow knew I might as well have picked them out myself.

  I know this man, I thought, slowly, sounding the paradox through in my mind. Even though I do not know this man.

  But I WANTED to know this man.

  Lit from within by sudden desire, I closed my eyes and bit down hard on my lower lip, tasting his flesh as sharply as though it were my own.

  Movement stirred by my elbow—Gil, upright once more, reverently stroking his own well-punished cheeks. He winced and grinned, drowsily ecstastic, blissed out on an already-peaking surge of endorphins.

  Turning, I screamed, over the beat: “WHO’S THE DUDE?”

  He raised a brow. “TONY HU?”

  Definitely not.

  “I KNOW WHO TONY HU IS, GIL.”

  “THEN WHY’D YOU ASK?” he screamed back, shrugging.

  Obviously, not a night for subtlety. I waved goodbye and stepped quickly off, resolved to take matters firmly by the balls. I wove my way back across the dance-floor, eyes kept firmly on the prize: Mr. Hunk Of The Millennium’s retreating back, bright with subtle muscle; the clean flex and coil of his golden spine, calling to me even more clearly with every footfall.

  He was a walking slice of pure aura, a streak of sexual magnetism, and I followed him as far and as quickly as I could—up the ramp and into the washroom at the head of the stairs, just past the coat-check stand, not the large one with the built-in shower stalls (so useful for Jock Nights and Wet Diaper Contests) but the small one with the barred windows, built to cater to those few customers whose bladders had become temporarily more important to them than their genitals.

  The place had no back door, not even an alcove to hide in. But when I finally got there, I found the place empty except for a man crouched half on his knees by the far wall, wiping his mouth and wavering back and forth above a urinal full of fresh vomit.

  Annoyed by the force of my own disappointment, I hissed through my teeth and kicked the back of the washroom door. The sound made the man look up, woozily.

  “Jude,” he said. “It is you. Right?”

  I narrowed my eyes. Shrugged.

  “You should know,” I replied. Adding: “Ed.”

  * * *

&nbs
p; He said he’d planned to spend the night waiting for me, but that the Khyber’s buy one drink, get another one of equal or lesser value free policy had begun to take its toll pretty early on. I agreed that he certainly seemed in no shape to get himself home alone.

  As for what followed, I’ve definitely had worse—from the same source, too. He didn’t puke again, either, which is always a big plus.

  That night—wrapped in Ed’s arms, breathing his beer-flavored breath—I dreamed of Carra hanging between heaven and earth with one foot on cliff, the other in air, like the Tarot’s holy Fool. I dreamed she looked at me with her empty eyes, and asked: What did you do to yourself, Jude? Oh, Jude. What did you do?

  And I woke, shivering, with a whisper caught somewhere in the back of my throat—nothing but three short words to show for all my arcane knowledge, in the end, when questioned so directly. Just I, and don’t, and know.

  But thinking, resentfully, at almost the same time: I mean, you’re the psychic, right? So . . .

  . . . you tell me.

  * * *

  The next morning, Ed came out of the kitchen with coffees and Danishes in hand, only to find me hunting around for my pants; he stopped in his tracks, striking a pose of anguished surprise so flawless I had to stop myself—from laughing.

  “You heartless little bastard,” he said.

  I sighed.

  “We broke up, Ed,” I reminded him, gently. “Your idea, as I recall.”

  “So why’d you even call me, then—if you were just planning to suck and run?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You fucking well did.”

  I glanced up from my search, suddenly interested—this conversation was beginning to sound familiar, in more ways than one. Shades of Franz, so sure I was the one who’d called him about Jen. So definite in his belief that I’d actually told him I would help her out with the latest in her series of recurrent supernatural/psychological problems . . . and for free, no less.

  “You called last night, when I was studying for Trig. Said you’d been thinking about us. Said you’d be down at the Khyber anyway, so show up, and you’d find me.”

  “Last night.”

  “Oh, Jude, enough with this bullshit. You’re telling me what, it just slipped your mind?” He grabbed his desk phone, stabbed for the star key and brandished it my way. “How about that?”

  I squinted at the display. “That says ‘unknown caller’,” I pointed out.

  Ed dropped the phone, angrily. “Look, fuck you, okay? It was you.”

  With or without evidence, there was something interesting going on here. A call from somebody who claims to be me being received once is a misunderstanding, maybe a coincidence. But twice? In the same night?

  By two different people?

  I see you twice, Grandmother Yau had said. And Carra, weighing her words:

  . . . something.

  My pants proved to be wadded up and shoved under the bed, right next to Ed’s cowboy boots. I shook them out, pulled them back on, buttoned the fly. Ed, meanwhile, kept right on with his time-honored tirade, hitting all the usual high spots: My lack of interest, my lack of loyalty. My lack, out of bed, of anything that might be termed normal emotional affect. My lack, in general.

  Adding, quieter: “And you never loved me, either. Fuck, you never even really wanted me to love you.”

  “Did I ever say I did?”

  “Yes.”

  Coat already half done up, I looked at him again, frankly amazed. Unable to stop myself from blurting—

  “—and you believed me?”

  * * *

  Heartless, I found myself repeating—a good half-hour later—as I fought my way east through the College Street wind tunnel, back from Ed’s apartment. Heart-lost. Heard last. Hardglass. Then, smiling slightly: Hard-ASS.

  The word itself disintegrating under close examination, melting apart on my mental tongue. Like it was ever supposed to mean anything much—aside from Ed’s latest take on the established him/me party line: “I used to quote-quote ‘love’ you, but now I quote-quote ‘hate’ you, and here’s yet another lame excuse why.”

  Annoyed to realize I was still thinking about it, I shrugged the whole mess away in one brief move, so hard and quick it actually hurt.

  Chi-shien gweilo! I thought. What would I want with a heart? You don’t need a heart to do magic.

  Which is true. You don’t.

  No more than you need a shadow.

  * * *

  A sharp left turn, then Church Street again: Going down, this time. My Docs struck hard against the cracked concrete, again and again—each new stride sending up aftershocks that made my ankles spark with pain, as though that shrugged-away mess were somehow boomeranging back to haunt me with its ever-increasing twinge. And because I couldn’t moderate myself, couldn’t control either my speed or my boots’ impact, the ache soon reached my chest—after a couple of blocks—and lodged there, throbbing.

  Rhythm becoming thought, thought becoming memory; memory, which tends to shuck itself, to peel away. You get older, look back through a child’s tunnel vision, and realize you never knew the whole that tied the details together. You were just along for the ride, moving from experience to experience, a flat spectacle, some kind of guideless tour. You remember—or think you remember—what happened, but not where, or why. What you did, but not with who. Details fade. People’s names get lost in the white noise.

  Reluctantly, therefore—for the second time in as many days—I found myself thinking about that shell of a thing I’d once been, back before the big split: That fresh-faced, fresh-scrubbed, fresh-off-the-boat Chink twink with his fifteen pairs of matching penny-loafers and his drawer-full of grey silk ties. And just as smiley-face quiet, as neat and polite, as veddy, veddy, Brit-inflectedly restrained as he’d always been, the homegrown HK golden boy mask still firmly in place, even without a Ba and Ma immediately on hand to do his patented straight-Asian-male dance for anymore . . .

  Up ‘till he’d met Carra, at least. ‘Till she’d sat down beside him in study hall, her sleeves pushed up to show the desperate phantom scribble circling one wrist like a ringworm surfacing for air; looked right through him like his head was made of glass, seen all his ugly, hidden parts at once, and shown him exactly how wrong he’d always been about the nature he struggled to keep in check at all costs, the fears—formless and otherwise—he’d fought against tooth and nail all his relatively brief, bland, blind little life.

  How restraint wasn’t about powerlessness in the face of such terrors at all, but rather about being afraid of your own power. Its reality, its strength. Its endless range of unchecked possibilities, the good, the bad—

  —and the indifferent.

  I remember how freeing it felt to not “have” to watch myself all the time, at long last; nobody else was going to do it for me, and why should they? My first impulse, in every situation—as I well knew—was always to the angry, the selfish, the petty. I tried to be kind, mainly because I’d been so rigidly inculcated with the general Taoist/Christian principle that doing so was always the “right” thing to do. But even when I managed a good deed here and there, I knew it to be just so much hypocrisy, nothing more. It was the least I could do, so I did it.

  Parental love is a matchless thing; if it weren’t for that, most of us wouldn’t have a pot to piss in, affectionately speaking. But even at its most irreplaceable, it’s still pretty cheap. Any ape loves their children; spiders lie still while theirs crawl around inside them, happy to let them eat their guts.

  The only reason anybody unrelated is ever nice to anyone else, meanwhile, is as a sort of pre-emptive emotional strike—to prevent themselves from being treated as badly, potentially, as they might have treated other people. Which makes love only the lie two brains on spines tell each other, the lie that says: “You exist, because I love
you. You exist, because you can see yourself in my eyes.”

  So we blunder from hope to hope, hollowed and searching. All of us equally incomplete.

  And after all these years, still the sting comes, the liquid pressure in the chest and nose, the migraine-forerunner frown. Phantom pain. The ghost without the murder.

  But what the fuck? That’s all it is, ever. You want to be loved. You tell other people you love them, in order to trick them into loving you back. And after a while, it’s true. You feel the pull, the ache.

  The vibrato, voice keening skyward. The wet edge. Every word a whine. Weak, weak, weak, weak, weak.

  When I say “you,” of course, I mean “me.” This is because everything is about me. To me. Why not? I’m the only me I have.

  Truth is, none of us deserve anything. We get what we get.

  And the best you can ever hope for . . . is to train yourself not to care.

  Ahead, Ryerson loomed; residence row, with a Second Cup on either side of the street and competing hookers on every corner, shivering aslant on their sagging vinyl boot-heels.

  I paused at Gould, waiting for a slow light, and put one itch-etched palm to my chest—telling myself it was to chart the ache’s progress, rather than to keep myself from jarring the light’s signal free with a sudden burst of excess entropic energy. Felt the charge building in my bones, begging for expression. For expulsion.

  Some opportunity to turn this—whatever—I felt myself tentatively beginning to feel safely outward, without risk of repercussion. To evict the unwanted visitor, wash myself clean and empty and ready for use again, like any good craftsman’s basic set of tools; make myself just an implement once more, immune to the temptations of personal desire.

  What had I cut myself in half for, in the first place, if not for that? Scarred my heel, halved my soul, driven Franz and Jen one way and Carra the other, busted the Black Magic Posse back down to its dysfunctional roots so I could be this arcane study group’s sole graduating student, its unofficial last man standing. And all to immunize myself to stress and fear and lack of focus—to free myself from every law but that of gravity, while still making sure I could probably break that one too, if I just put my back into it. Dictator For Life of a one-person country, my own private Hierarchical Idaho.