by Nick Mamatas
“But, fucking Satan . . .”
“Karl Marx occasionally signed his letters ‘Old Nick.’ He knew what he was doing.”
“Satan doesn’t believe in equality!” Greg blurted out. A treeful of birds took flight. “Communism is all about the weak conquering the strong. The strong should rule!”
“Shucks, Greggie. Did you buy a copy of The Satanic Bible at the B. Dalton in the mall with your bar mitzvah money?”
“What, you think it’s bullshit?”
“Anything you can buy in a shopping mall is bullshit, dude.”
“You can buy The Communist Manifesto in a mall too,” Greg said.
“No, anything you can buy, Greg,” I said. “Would you buy The Communist Manifesto? Can you? Can you bear to pick up a copy, bring it over to the cashier, and pay five bucks for your very own copy of Marx and Engels?” I didn’t look back as I turned the corner around a house where the backyard never ended, but just melded into the wooded area behind Bernstein’s shack.
“Well, why would I want to buy—”
“Greg,” I said. Using a person’s name repeatedly is a powerful way of focusing their attention. “I’ll let you fuck me if you can buy a copy of the fucking book. I’m not even joking. I’ll put your balls in my mouth. I’ll do it even if you just say you can buy a copy.”
Greg snorted. “Communism’s fucking over. People are running away from it. They want blue jeans and the Scorpions.”
“So, no cock sucking?”
“No.”
“Then you, my friend,” I said, “have a cop in your head. What are you, a rebel and a tough guy who wants to grind the weak under his heel just because he can, or . . .” I let it hang there. Before Greg could even say his snotty little, “Or what?” I added, “A proud American?”
“I am a proud American!” Greg said. He caught himself, blushed again, but too late. “I mean, we’re the fucking best. We rock.” He added, more quietly, “Fuck you, Dawn.”
“Keep America beautiful,” I said. “Let’s pick up some of this stuff and see what we can see.” We were atop the hill over Bernstein’s cabin. There was yellow police tape everywhere, but it drooped into puddles and piles of leaves. LILCO, or the county, or whoever was supposed to be in charge, hadn’t bothered to remove the tree. Some of Bernstein’s papers had escaped through the gash in the roof and were tangled up in the grass, in those fingery autumn branches he loved, or had just dissolved into blue-and-white piles of pulp from exposure to the elements. I did find an old Love and Rockets comic I had left there and hugged it to myself. Greg asked, incredulously, “Girls read comics?” I rolled my eyes at him.
Most of the papers were beyond salvaging. The ink had fallen right off the pages—Bernstein was a snob for fountain pens and never typed or printed anything up. Letters to Bernstein were in better shape, but often full of schizophrenic gibberish or plaintive begging for secrets, insights, and money. After a few disappointing minutes, I convinced Greg, wiry as he was, to climb the tree and see if he could drop down through the hole in the roof to get to the file cabinets.
“Wouldn’t it be cool if the body was still in there?” he asked as he scaled the slantways trunk. My heart clenched and died, but I said sure. Greg wormed through the tear in the house and was gone for a few minutes. Then he called for me to meet him by the window, the one through which Bernstein could always see me.
“The cops took a lot of stuff, but the bottom drawers of both cabinets were full. I couldn’t get them out, but I pulled the folders.” Greg handed me a bunch, then ducked down and came up with more. Wouldn’t it be cool if he were trapped in this little gray shack forever, starving and decaying but never dying? I thought while waiting for him to make his way back up the hole and around the yard, but he managed it anyway. Greg lost interest in the materials right away, when he saw that a lot of it looked like math and much of the rest like train schedules from unknown cities. Indeed, much of it made little more sense to me than 777 did, but I had some understanding of what was being described and discussed. And occulted, of course.
Greg, in his invincible ignorance, noticed something I didn’t. “Some of this penmanship is weird,” he said. We were sitting against the side of the house, open folders on our laps. “Same pen, right?” He held up two pieces of paper—originals, not carbons. Bernstein had always mailed people carbons but kept his own work close by. Something about art in the age of mechanical reproduction. “Different handwriting. Are any of these yours, maybe? This one looks girly.”
It was automatic writing. Correspondence between Bernstein and himself, or his Holy Guardian Angel. It looked almost like but not exactly like his usual penmanship. I took the folder from Greg and started skimming. Greg was attracted to these letters because they were actual letters—a Platonic dialogue of sorts, almost comprehensible to someone like him. Bernstein had had a crisis of “faith,” for lack of a better word, when people started leaving the Eastern bloc en masse. Bernstein had been a Trotskyist years ago, and even stood around the Long Island Rail Road yards in Queens with a copy of a mimeographed revolutionary newspaper for a few hours every Thursday evening and Saturday morning, hoping to stir up the proletariat. I’d seen an old copy of the rag—it was mostly concerned with sectarian battles against the “Pabloites,” to name something that no LIRR employee was at all concerned with. Bernstein’s international had nine members in New York, three in Chicago, and two in Montreal. It was really an extended family; the Canadians were some cousins of the group’s leader, and his wife and kid were heavily involved as well. But it’s the nature of Trotskyist groups to fission, Bernstein told me, and eventually he found himself a faction of one after the relatives had some horrifying Christmastime argument about El Salvador. Also, half the New York cadre were FBI agents.
But Bernstein kept at it. Trotskyism was a pure kind of “antinomian praxis,” he explained to his Holy Guardian Angel—to himself—that had opened many psychic doors. Even Nazism, that great bellow of rage and resentment from the disaffected, one that had disguised itself as a manifestation of the Overman, was disqualified for actually having had succeeded for a little while. Nothing supported by that many frumpy hausfraus could truly be a rebellion—Bernstein could be a sexist, like all men, regardless of their politics. Of course, Bernstein was also Jewish, which made the cultivation of Nazi politics problematic. Would anyone at the American Nazi Party ever even write him back? But Trotskyism—there was a political framework that wouldn’t ever win. But now, that was Bernstein’s problem. Not only was Trotskyism not winning politically; it wasn’t winning intellectually. None of Trotsky’s predictions had come true. They were all unraveling, every night on television. Soon there would be no alternative to neoliberal capitalism at all. O Holy Guardian Angel, what shall I do?
The response wasn’t Shoot yourself in the head, boychik.
Then Greg said, “Hey, do you think it’s true what they say: the perpetrator always returns to the scene of the crime?”
“People say that?”
“On television, they do. But even then it’s . . .”
“Ironic? A cliché that they’re making fun of.”
Greg said, “Yeah. But where did the idea come from? Is it true?”
“Are you worried?” I asked. “Maybe he already came and left.”
“Maybe he’s here right now,” Greg said. “Or she.”
“Oh, you think it was me. I see. I thought you were confessing at first.” Greg was getting agitated. The best thing to do with an agitated moron is to fan the flames, so they do something exceptionally stupid.
“Maybe it was you. Maybe you’re trying to frame me. We’re interfering with a crime scene, aren’t we? God, this was fucking stupid—” He threw down the papers he had been leafing through. “Is this evidence? Are my fingerprints on this evidence now? Holy shit, Dawn, what the fuck are you doing to me?”
I turned square to look at him, fill his vision. “What are we doing here, Greg? Why did you come with me?”
“Look, I . . . You owe me.”
“Oh, I owe?” I laughed. “Oh I oh hi-ho!” Greg needed to know I was laughing at him. The big black thing roared up from the Abyss living under where our asses sat and filled my body, swimming behind my eyes. “What do I owe you, eh?”
“Fuckin’ bitch.” He licked his lips. His eyes got wide. He didn’t have the Will for what he wanted to do to me—a slap across the face, followed by some bullshit HBO movie love rape—but he was close.
“C’mere,” I told him, and slid my hand around his head to pull him close. We kissed. I slid onto his lap, then I bit his face, hard, tearing into the flesh of his lips and cheeks. He shrieked and pushed me away. Greg was a skinny guy, but boys have good upper body strength. That’s what I was expecting, of course, so when he pushed me off of him, I took the skin between my teeth with me. He covered up, curled into a ball, and howled. I spit out what was in my mouth and scrambled to my feet, ready to kick in his ribs if he found some courage and came at me. But Greg had nothing but a faceful of pain that wouldn’t go away. The flesh around the mouth is full of nerves, and germs, but I made sure not to bite him so hard that he’d lose consciousness or go numb. He needed every moment, and every moment needed to stretch.
“There’s some Satan for you, asshole!” I said. “That’s what I owed you. So forget about going to the police or your parents or anything. Anyone asks you, you were bitten by a wild dog. Anyone asks me, you tried to rape me and I defended myself. Then your ugly face gets in all the papers, and your parents get to pay for an AIDS test for me. I have use for you, so here’s what I’m going to do—I’m going to rush to the very next house and beg them to call an ambulance. And you’ll get some stitches and you’ll be okay. Enjoy the rabies shots, by the way. I’m told it’s only seven long needles now, not forty shots in the belly like it used to be.”
Then I ran, like I said I would, and called back over my shoulder, “Leave the painting behind the shed in your yard. I’ll pick it up later!”
6.
Bernstein had promised me that he would do something that worked. I’d challenged him in the ways I now know are typical of idiot seekers. “If you’re such a powerful magician, how come you’re not rich?” I demanded to know, though most of my spending money came from him, and I certainly had never seen him put on a suit and go to work for it. Like the fancy old ladies who never bought hats, but just had them, Bernstein always just had whatever amount of money he needed. He just laughed and told me that most Marxists who take it seriously—“and who aren’t in a political cult”—end up rich sooner or later. “We understand capitalism so much better than anyone else, after all.”
“All right. Can you make people do things they wouldn’t normally do?” I asked, from between his pasty thighs. I didn’t even make eye contact with him when I sucked him off, because he didn’t like that. His leg hair tickled me. But it doesn’t take magick to be richer than a high school kid, or to get a girl to suck a dick. Crowley’s definition—Magic is the Science and Art of causing change to occur in accordance with the Will—sounded to me like a cop-out, and I said as much. Any eight-year-old learning to play the piano is a magician, then.
Bernstein nodded, and hrmmed sonorously. I suppose chatting during cock-sucking breaks was my way of establishing some independence. “Many people would now feed you a line about quantum entanglement or some other scientific theory they don’t understand. I certainly don’t understand quantum mechanics, or any more physics than it takes to ride a teeter-totter successfully or set a kettle of tea to boil.
“But I am a materialist, Amaranth.” He still occasionally called me Amaranth, which always felt like a subtle bit of mockery and affection simultaneously. “The world is matter in motion and nothing else. The mystic sees the world as an illusion—but the magician must see reality square in the face.” He tapped me on the shoulder. I could stop tonguing his balls, I guessed.
“If you want to see something real, come with me,” he said. He pulled up his pants and went to the small wardrobe next to the television. A few minutes later we were out back. He had turned off the lights and the television, and we were far enough from both the other houses and the road that the woods were dark. Bernstein had thrown on a churchy-looking robe and held a thin lance in his hand. He drew a circle around us, then another, then made some marks in the dirt. It was too dark to see, and a bit chilly. I was neither an enthusiast nor was I a skeptic; I was just a disinterested party, watching some intriguing ritual, as I did virtually every evening anyway. Bernstein said some words, and snapped the lance in half over his knee. Then we waited.
I waited for my eyes to adjust, but they didn’t. I thought about something I’d learned in my psychology elective. It’s very difficult to determine if hypnosis actually “works” to make people do things that are unsafe or that go against their natures. Most subjects under hypnosis will drink what they’re told is a vial of acid. So too will people who aren’t under hypnosis, as long as they’re part of a hypnosis experiment. So I was awake and even agitated in my own brain, the little homunculus with his hands on the levers of my limbs waiting for the signal to run, or to punch Bernstein, or to just keep them shivering and twitching ever so slightly. So, was I being hypnotized, or was I just a part of a hypnosis experiment?
I reached forward to find Bernstein and instead hit stone. A great slab wall of the smoothest stone, and I knew there was no wall like that around, knew that I hadn’t lost any time so couldn’t have been shoved into a car and transported somewhere. I touched my own face to make sure I hadn’t been blindfolded—and to make sure I wouldn’t feel stone no matter what I came into contact with—and my face was fine. I took a step back and bumped into another wall. I spread both arms and hit a wall with one, then the other. It was a pentagon, five walls all around me, with rounded corners. The floor was still dirt and leaves and twigs, but I dug with my hands at the base and found only wall. I took a pebble light enough that it wouldn’t kill me coming back down and threw it high to look for a ceiling, or a rim. It landed right in front of me without hitting anything. I remembered the steel toes in my boots, braced myself, and kicked the wall in front of me. It was solid; I felt the impact in my shin. I shouted for Bernstein and my voice sounded like I was at the bottom of a well. Was this a real thing? Had I been led into a well somehow? And now, Bernstein would take my skin off with a potato peeler and wear it himself.
Bernstein stepped in front of me and snapped his fingers, setting off some flash paper. That trick I knew, but I blinked hard and reached out blindly to grab his robe. I got it, and started slapping at him. “What the fuck! What the fuck was that!”
“Magick!” Bernstein took the blows easily enough. My heart wasn’t really in them anyway.
“How did you do that?” Finally, my eyes adjusted to the dazzle and the dark and I could see him.
“As I said . . . magick.”
“Was there something under the robe?” I reached for it, but he pulled away. “Did you smear LSD on your cock?”
“That would be intriguing for both of us, what with the glans being mucocutaneous tissue,” he said brightly.
I sputtered as I realized what I was saying, but I couldn’t think of many other rational explanations. Bernstein snickered, and then shrugged. “I can’t tell you how I did it, or even what I did. I can show you. It will take a long time. You’ll have to do what I say without question or hesitation. Much of what I will ask of you will seem incomprehensible, stupid, or contradictory. And—”
“And in the end, when I’m ready to hear the big secret, to learn the Key to It All, you’ll whisper in my ear, ‘The secret is that there is no secret,’ ” I said.
“That, I swear I won’t do, Amaranth.” Bernstein even put his hand over his heart. “There are a lot of tricksters and frauds, but I am not one of them. In fact, I’m pretty much the only not-one of them. What you experienced was magick. I'm happy to initiate you into the practice. Now, let’s go back inside
.”
I was tempted to leave, but I had left my bag inside. And inside, I saw something far more real. It was a tiny man, about two feet tall, with a furry ass and legs. A satyr—my mind groped for the word. He smiled at me, showing off a face full of shark’s teeth, then he leapt through the window, shattering it. I fell to my knees. The room smelled like raw meat and composting summertime grasses. I had a million questions, but I knew there’d be no answers.
Even now, I still have theories. Hallucinogens and hypnosis, plus a BB gun. A balloon or a puppet or a midget confederate for some long con or sex game that Bernstein would have completed had he not been shot in the head. I’ve read all the Houdini stuff, the Amazing Randi material, the endless debunkings. I know prestidigitation and the various tricks, just like any twelve-year-old with a library card might. And I know how even in its debased and tawdry form, stage magic honors the real thing.
7.
I learned. In my own primitive way, I’d made Greg an acolyte. Marked him in a way that separated him from the world he knew, and brought him into my world. Had he been smarter, I would have had to have been cleverer. But he wasn’t that bright, just bright enough to make an okay ally, and likely a perfect fall guy if needed. A few years ago, in Northport, a longhair acidhead named Ricky Kasso killed some guy who owed him money. Then he killed himself. Kasso had played his murder up with all the minor-league spectacle he could muster—he brought the guy out to the woods, shouted, “Say you love Satan!” and even scrawled satan lives on a nearby boulder. Or he tried to anyway. Ricky Kasso wasn’t very smart either, so he spelled it satin lives. He wasnvt even into particularly dark metal. He liked AC/DC and Judas Priest, to name two bands that get played on WBAB thirty times a day. There’s nothing to that music, either forward or backward. If there were, everyone in high school would already be dead. But it upsets parents and it upsets cops, so longhairs are practically the niggers of the North Shore now. Greg would make a great lightning rod, if necessary.
