by Nick Mamatas
“Bernstein . . .” I said, and though I whispered I was sure everyone heard me, and everyone knew of him, and everyone now understood him. This is what he had been looking for in the pages of Workers Vanguard, and in his brief trip aboard the Red Submarine, and in his endless rituals, the psychedelic experiences, the Hermetic experiments.
Water is cold and gets colder the deeper one goes. But beyond where men can swim, where the sheer fact of water is so dense we can not penetrate without crushing our bones and meatbags to jelly, water boils and seethes. In the coils of the Leviathan. The monster burned with rage. I knew the feeling, and I smiled. And I knew what was going to happen to me now. There’d be no j______, but there would be vengeance. I would swallow Mammon whole.
The song stopped, and the lights flared to life. I already had my eyes closed. My father wrapped his necktie—the one I bought him, with horseshoes on it for good luck—around my neck, and Chelsea punched me in the stomach. There was a generalized cheer as I buckled over. The bitch had palmed a roll of quarters or something. Big Aram grabbed me by the shoulders and pushed me onto the little stage, and expertly tied the tongue of Dad’s necktie around a trio of thin copper pipes running along the low ceiling of the basement. It was tight around my neck, but not too bad. I could even address the crowd, if I so wanted.
“Yeah!” Dad said. “Fuck fucking yeah!” He spun on his heel to get a good look at everyone, and to make sure that everyone got a good look at him. “See, this is going to happen, just like I said!” Chelsea twitched her jaw, contemplative. I glanced around the room myself, not looking for allies, but rather for reactions. Greg was pale, sweaty. He took a step forward, but some guy whose muscles showed like bowling balls under his preppy sweater put a thick palm on his chest and stopped him. Roderick was cool. He winked at me. Most everyone else was hungry for me.
Bernstein had never fucked me. My mouth, sure. Honestly, part of my attraction to him, part of why I kept coming around his little shack of a house in those early days was in the hope that he would. What would he be like in bed, for real? Would he close his eyes? Was he a chatterer? The type to say “Good girl” or just grunt? Were his chest and arms covered in scars from his attempts at Liber III vel Jugorum? Was he a condom fumbler or the type of guy to just pull out and come on my tits, then expect me to coo like some porn star?
Which I totally would have done for him, had he wanted to fuck me. But he didn’t. Instead, we breathed together, adopted yoga postures together, and spent hours in these awkward positions, reading the sectarian left press together for kernels of Divine Wisdom together. And I sucked him off like I was a diabetic and his ov was insulin. I had a very strong jaw, and neck, thanks to Bernstein.
Dad started ranting, and gesticulating. Something about the “excess road to wisdom leads to a palace!” He hardly knew anything about magick; drugs had scrambled his brains as much as the ice pick had scrambled Trotsky’s. But he had his Chelsea, who was smiling at me, like she was the flower girl and I was the bride, and this small crowd of people—maybe twenty-five all told—were the guests, and they were rapt. I don’t know if they believed Dad’s shit, or just wanted to see a girl get killed, live and in 3-D. Fat Joshua from the comic shop had eased down the cellar door steps and filled up that little doorway. Mike was sharking his way to the front, cutting between shoulders with the palm of his hand. He made it up to Dad and squeezed his shoulder.
“This is fantastic. You’re a fucking hero, man,” he said.
“Yeah, I am,” Dad said. “Now don’t fucking interrupt me again.” He looked to Aram. “Take him!” Aram actually did lurch over and grab Mike by the collar, but there was really nowhere to go in the overcrowded basement, so they both just stood there, looking stupid. I glanced back at Karen. She had a hand on her chest, and was rubbing.
Dad’s valedictory didn’t make much sense. He was a magus. I was a sacrifice. My blood would swirl down the drains built into the basement floor and feed the Great Thing on which Long Island was built. The capitalist system was working too well—the commies were running, collapsing like a house of cards and falling like dominoes, and wilting under the fires of superior productivity, and dissolving like rock in the pipe, and other clichés, and that was not fair. Not fair to anyone who had been told that their services were no longer required at Grumman, Sperry, Fairchild, all the defense contractors with local offices. A peace dividend, Dad snarled rhetorically, would just lead to division into pieces, and poverty for the assembled.
My father always had an air of rat-like charisma about him, and times were tough on Long Island. He could have sold insurance to teenagers with freshly minted drivers’ licenses, or prime Florida swampland to seniors eager to follow the advice on the banners some guy had hung on overpasses: get out of new york state, before it’s too late! Dad could have done a lot of things, but instead he did all this. A little cult of thirty desperate people or so. That’s magick, and politics, these days.
“We’ll all live like niggers!” he shouted. “You want that?” Dad demanded of one guy in particular, who was too surprised to answer. So Dad turned and shoved his index finger into someone else’s chest. “Do you?” That guy just shook his head no, slowly and gravely.
“Because that’s what I’ve been doing. On purpose! Living like a nigger. On Long Island, where there aren’t supposed to be any goddamned niggers, I smoked crack! I sucked dick for five bucks a pop just to get another rock! I would have fucked my own daughter, just like those dirty niggers do!” He gestured at Chelsea with that revelation. She was stoic, smirking even. “I had to crawl down into the muck and horror of it all, to bring back the fire of wisdom, to understand what is to be done!” I could almost hear the capitals: What Is To Be Done, like Lenin’s famous pamphlet.
“I’ll kill my only begotten daughter, a commie and a whore. It’ll all come back,” Dad said. “Something else will rise in the East, orientis! And America will come crawling back to us,” he said, his arms wide. “For her defense. Lady Liberty, on her knees like a whore, eyes wide and mouth open. She shall never raise her head from our laps again.”
I looked over at Mike. He cringed and mouthed four words: There is no alternative. Packed with occult significance, that phrase was. Margaret Thatcher’s line—there is no alternative to neoliberal global capitalism. TINA. Death to Communism, death to even social democracy and the welfare state. Death to society; there’s no such thing as society anyway. Mike looked terrified. What would the yang of capitalism be without the yin of Communism to keep it in check, and to keep Mike’s identity as a revolutionary intact and unchanging? There was no alternative to capitalism; we both knew that now, and for Mike there was no alternative save to throw in with Dad, against Bernstein, and join this fascist schism from the Invisible Party, and keep the red flag waving. No wonder he had wanted to keep an eye on me after coming to bail me out of prison. Hell, no wonder he had actually bothered bailing me out. Even Aram and Karen were slaves to the state. Without the threat of Communism, and the allure of radical chic, the state universities would have their budgets slashed, and ultimately they’d be privatized. There is no alternative . . .
to having to go out and get a real job. Good luck, English majors.
I was suddenly very happy that Mike was standing next to my father, and next to Chelsea. I wondered if Chelsea’s real name wasn’t “Tina.” These things have a tendency to harmonize.
But here’s what Dad misunderstood. Everything was harmonizing around me, not him. I was the synthesis of Bernstein’s thesis and his antithesis. He was summoning up that which he could not put down. This motley crew of accountants and academics and hausfraus would never be the revolutionary class—they would never be Leviathan. A cabal of idiot imps begging a greater God to intervene on their collective behalf? These fuckers should have just gone to church or something. Leviathan had been calling to me, filling me up, since Bernstein’s death. Bernstein was the sacrifice for the summoning, and Leviathan was bound to me. There are no c
oincidences. Leviathan had brought these people here, on deep currents of magick and geopolitics, before me. I was on the podium; they stood low before me. I was the executioner; they were to fill the drains with their blood and fat, on which Leviathan would sup. Even the choice of a basement made it easier for me, for the beast under my feet. It was cold outside, but so hot where I was standing. Oh, that furnace.
I began dharana. The Tower. Break down the fortress of thine individual self, that thy truth may spring free from the ruins. Quarrel, combat, danger, ruin, destruction of plans, sudden death, escape from prison—his interpretation from The Book of Thoth. Crowley’s Tower is not just struck down by lightning; it is consumed from below by the great maw of Dis. All that is solid melts into air. Dad’s voice was a buzz, of no concern to me. It only took an instant for enlightenment to strike. The waters of the deep boiled under me, in me, over me.
Dad made a few more flourishes, then Chelsea flicked open a straight razor and handed it to him with a smile on her face. The rest of the crowd was serious.
“Wait, don’t!” I said, holding out my hands. “No, please!”
I showed everyone my palms.
“Why didn’t you chain up her arms!” Mike cried. “Christ, did you lose them?”
Nothing up my sleeves.
“Doesn’t matter,” Dad said. He stepped up onto the stage to stand right before me.
And now, the levitation trick.
I tensed my neck and jaw, and lifted my legs, tucking my knees under my breasts. It was hard. My throat clamped shut. Eyes bulged open. Hung in the air. Feet twitching. Dad threw out an arm to draw the razor. In the left. That sinister hand. Then Leviathan. It called to me, and I was pulled down to the earth.
Abrahadabra!
And the three copper pipes, thin hot-water pipes, on which I had been hanging, came with me. The solder on the seams gave way. Cheap suburban Long Island ticky-tacky shit. Dad ate a faceful of steam and scalding water. His nose disintegrated before he even started screaming, and his eyes were smashed to jelly in their sockets. Mike almost dodged, but one of the boiling streams pulled his cheeks from his skull and filled his mouth, and cooked his lungs.
And Chelsea, sweet little Chelsea who looked like a skinny version of me, whose lithe body—Daddy’s favorite thing—wouldn’t have sundered the pipes had she been the one hanging, had she lifted her feet—she went slow. She got a faceful of Job 14:20—Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron—but lived long enough to claw at her face and scream and spit teeth before running right into Dad’s flailing arms, into the razor meant for me. The air was all steam and misty blood.
It all took less than a second. The crowd burst toward the doors, howling and throwing their limbs over their faces.
Aram made a mad dash for the razor. “No!” he shouted at the heart of the world. His Will rose up like a mountain pushed high with magma, and he would have slit me from throat to cunt, I know it, but for Roderick. He had one of the fishing oars from the wall and cracked it on the back of Aram’s neck. Aram fell in front of me, and I looked up and smiled.
Greg was there too, with an oar of his own. “Uh, we should go!” he croaked out. “Heavy fucking shit!” I coughed in response and waved them away. Roderick held out a hand but I mouthed the word Go! And they did, cleaving a path through the last knot of evacuees. Greg nailed Joshua with a pretty heavy shot on his way out, and Joshua went down even harder, head first on the cement steps of the cellar. One more thing for me to step over, I thought.
I found a few valves on the pipes leading back to the furnace and turned them till the water stopped. I took a few deep breaths. It wouldn’t matter if someone called the cops, or if they came. There was no place I could be locked up where my Will would not be free, where Leviathan would not be coiling and churning right under my feet.
But then, I realized that among the corpses of my enemies, one was missing. Riley. I palmed my keys and headed out to the Rabbit.
20.
Marx has a great line. It’s so great, in fact, that it is often misquoted and misused. It goes like this: Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Usually, people think it’s just about history repeating itself, and not historical figures bubbling up out of the dynamic of the world to make a fool of themselves a generation or three after appearing so terrible. And there was Riley, appearing for the second time, in his magickal vestments, jimmying open my car’s hatch.
“Hello,” I said. My voice was fried. I felt like my throat had been balled up and left at the bottom of a laundry hamper, then quickly and incompletely ironed three months later.
“Hi,” he said, with a wave and a nod. He had a leather portfolio case with him. The hatch finally opened and he removed the painting.
“That’s mine.”
“No ma’am,” he said, smiling. “It’s mine. I won it from a rival, long ago. Then lent it out, and it was never returned to me.”
“I just killed three people, and I need some milk or something to soothe my throat. So put the painting down.”
He did, but in a way that told me that he was planning on picking it right back up after our conversation was concluded, and bringing it to his Mercedes, which was parked just a few yards away.
“Oh, you’re a killer, eh? Anyone I know?”
“I’m sure. My father.”
“And he is . . . ?”
“Seliger,” I said. “Also, Mike Schmidt.”
“Ah yes, the Communist,” Riley said, solemnly. “The other Communist, I suppose I should say.”
“They were trying to kill me.”
Riley unzipped his portfolio, turned it upside down, and shook out some imaginary dust. Then he smoothed over his robes, and gathered up the fabric to examine the hem. “No agent of the state can perceive me while I wear this,” he murmured, mostly to himself.
“Have you tested it?” I asked.
“I’ve read the specs,” he said. Then he turned back to me, smiling a Ronald Reagan smile. “Why were they trying to kill you?”
“I was to be a sacrifice, to keep the Cold War going, so that everyone could have cushy defense contractor jobs. They were attempting to summon Leviathan, I believe, but Leviathan summoned me to kill them.”
“Well, you’re a very lucky young lady, Ms. Seliger,” he said. And he moved to put the painting into his bag. I grabbed the long sleeve of his robe.
“From whom did you win this painting?”
“Jerome Bernstein, of course,” Riley said. Then, as if I didn’t know, he added, “the artist.”
“And to whom did you lend it?”
“To your father, actually. He thought it would help him with something important.” Riley smiled. “His wife was ill. Was she your mother? I don’t mean to pry. Divorce and remarriage are so common these days. Marriage is but a contract, and contracts are made to be broken.”
“I thought they were made to be kept.”
“Depends on with whom one makes them, I suppose.”
“Yeah . . .” I said. “She was my mother. She’s dead.”
“I’m sorry to hear,” Riley said. “But your father never returned the painting. Did he give it to you?”
“No,” I said. “I found it. Some kid had it.”
“Who?” There was an edge in Riley’s voice now.
“Kid named Greg. Tall, blond. Dirtbag.”
“Oh, I saw him run by,” Riley said. “Were you trying to kill him?”
“No. But he had found it at a junk shop. The Greek Orthodox church one.”
Riley muttered Greek Orthodox and slapped his thigh. “Oh, well, I suppose I owe your father an apology, then. I bet what happened is that he brought the painting back to my home when I wasn’t home, and gave it to the maid. She was probably . . .” He stopped, and searched for a word. “. . . Perturbed by it and brought it to her priest.”
&nbs
p; “You don’t let her into the basement, I know,” I said.
Riley’s smile twitched. I cleared my throat while he composed himself.
“I see,” he finally said.
“What about your wife?”
“Oh, I’m not married. I do hire a woman to come in sometimes, sit around, eat a meal with me. That sort of thing.”
“Weird.”
Riley shrugged. He was very philosophical. I was actually enjoying this conversation. The Leviathan seemed to have retreated. I did not know how to kill this man.
“Well, it’s good for men to have female companionship. There are many ways to get it. Offer money, love, power . . .” He glanced at the painting. “Why did you think the painting was yours?”
“I . . . Well, I thought my father was given it by . . .” I coughed again. “ . . . The artist. I knew the artist well. I’d go to his house, sit around, occasionally share a meal with him.”
“Ah,” he said. “So you knew Bernstein.”
“I knew him. Very well, I knew him.”
“It was a tragedy, his suicide.”
“He didn’t commit suicide,” I said. “The gun was in the wrong hand. Someone killed him.”
Riley shook his head. “His Will was his own. But you’re very nearly correct in your suspicions. It wasn’t an everyday suicide.”
“What did you do to him?” I felt it in my stomach, in my throat. It wasn’t the great deep thing, it was just plain rage and bile.
“Ms. Seliger,” Riley told me, “I told him the truth. I initiated him into a higher level. He couldn’t handle it. The truth . . . rewired him. Of course he shot himself with his off hand; his entire Weltanschauung had been inverted.” He paused, then the smile returned, full force. “Do you know what Weltan—”
