by Nick Mamatas
“Yeah yeah, worldview.” I wanted to kill him, right here, but he was just so eager to share, so confident in his own powers, that I wanted to hear what he had to say. And also, I was afraid. Leviathan had receded into the dark waters underground. It was just me now, a girl with half-assed understandings of both magick and Marxism, against Mammon.
“Close enough. He and I have worked together for a long time. He was a fucking genius, Bernstein was. You were lucky to know him. But sometimes genius isn’t enough.”
“What did you tell him that was so earth shattering that you were able to reverse the fucking polarity of his brain and make him kill himself?” I said. I could tear this man apart with my bare hands, magick or no, j______ or no.
I thought the wrong thing. Or no. I gave my bare hands the choice, and my Will left them. Or no.
Riley leaned over and whispered a few very potent words in my ear. It was a sentence, a very dense sentence, that summed up years of his life, and all of his metaphysics. They were magic words, well rehearsed. They were lawyer words. Like Bernstein, I am a fucking genius, so I was able to apprehend all that he told me in an instant. To describe it might take a few more words than he used.
Riley’s axiom was a basic one—one generally embraced at the very beginning of magickal practice. The family, the clan, the state count for nothing; the Individual is the Autarch. Straight out of Magick without Tears. But in the occult world, whatever is exoterically true must certainly be esoterically false, or at least so oversimplified so as to be inaccurate. So Bernstein studied and practiced for years, reached out to master after guru after sifu after intellectual, trying to find the deeper secret. The Key to It All.
Riley had been very straightforward—the occult truth is that there is no occult truth. That’s what the Masons at the highest level were to have supposedly heard, once the bag came off their heads and the noose around their necks was loosened. There is no secret. Bernstein couldn’t believe it.
So Riley proposed a bet. This was years ago, when they were all in school, with my father. Riley claimed that with the New Aeon dawning, Bernstein and my father would both learn that there was no revolutionary class, no everlasting nation-state, no eternal family, no timeless clan. All that is solid would truly melt into air, forever and ever, world without end. The year was 1968. A general strike had rocked France, the Tet Offensive revealed American imperialism as a paper tiger, and the streets ran red with blood sacrifices, from Nguyễn Văn Lém to Martin Luther King. Riley was a Goldwater man, and had offered the bet even as his candidate was going down to the greatest defeat in a political race that any of the three friends could remember. So of course Bernstein took the bet that in twenty years all the work of the left would be undone, across the world. My father watched them shake hands on it, and grew bitter to be excluded. Dad had always been an extraneous curve in their magic circle; he was the generous kid ready to pay for things in exchange for some company, the guy who could wire a hi-fi system with his eyes closed.
Bernstein also cheated. The painting was a working. A sigil designed to bring down capitalism itself. He poured his blood, sweat, tears, and soul—all literally—into the paint to perfect the spell. Where there was growth, there would be collapse. Bernstein would have preferred a communal order, but he wasn’t against hedging his bet: a burning world of chaos and madness would have been as good as a win to him.
Riley was a kind person. He let the cheat slide, and said that he would just change the terms of the bet. When Riley won, he’d get the painting, as well as the five dollars they had put up. And by 1988, he had won. Reagan was completing his second term, China was on its way to becoming a capitalist superpower, and a little war in Nagorno-Karabakh showed that the Soviets hadn’t supplanted ancient ethnic divisions with class consciousness and a perfected human nature. Bernstein surrendered the painting to Riley, but almost immediately my father asked to borrow it.
What is capitalism but a kind of cancer—society’s economic cells growing out of control, threatening to consume so much that the entire system would die? My father wasn’t convinced that the bet was lost—Nagorno-Karabakh? Really?—and thought he could use Bernstein’s painting to arrest my mother’s cancer. Instead, she sickened and died quickly. Bernstein’s magic did work, just in the wrong way. He had misunderstood that capitalism is always about creative destruction. Even Leviathan is only a pawn in that destruction. The individual, just like Crowley said, will always win out over the herd, Riley explained. It’s just a matter of Will.
Then Riley started saying other words. No, not words. Hardly even phonemes. A language older than tongues. He knew the lines that angels whispered in a person’s ear when it was time to die. Hypnosis, the power of suggestion, weaponized neurolinguistic programming invented by the CIA and shared with major capitalists at the finest campaign fundraising dinners and cocktail parties—whatever it was, my own left hand began to shiver and quake. I tried to tell him to stop, but my throat was burning. Then I realized what to do. I focused on my right hand as much as I could, got it into my pocket, and pushed my finger into my spiked ring. Even as my left hand began to rise of its own accord—what was Riley ordering me to do to myself?—I chose the right-hand path.
I punched him in the neck. The air came out of him like a whistle, followed by a stream of blood.
And then I heard the sirens, then the grasping branches of the dead autumn trees were painted red, white, and blue. Fuck it, I ran down the dark street.
I looked back when I heard a thud and a cop car screech to a halt. I don’t know if Riley’s robe really rendered him invisible to agents of the state, but the black-and-white that winged him and sent him flying heels over head sure as hell didn’t see him. Riley hit the asphalt hard, but not hard enough.
I ran across lawns and squeezed through hedges. I had managed to turn myself around completely, and had no idea where I was except that I was away from the sirens. A pair of headlights rolled past me, then a cheap old boat of a car pulled to a stop.
“Hey!” It was Roderick, his head sticking out the passenger-side window. “Get in! We’ve been looking for you. We came back to try to get you!”
I ran for the car—it was a two-door, so squeezing in behind Roderick involved some stunt work and yanking—and tumbled into the back. The driver punched the gas and I lost my balance before ever fully gaining it.
Roderick turned around in his seat and offered me a hand. “So, magick? Fucked-up shit, eh? Please meet my uncle. He was an army medic back in the day, so I thought he could help you.”
I glanced over at the driver, who looked at me from the rearview mirror and smiled. Raymundo! My favorite person in this shithole town.
“Hello. I’m—” he started.
“The light of the world,” I finished.
21.
Call it a bourgeois-sentimentalist flinch. Call it yet another failure of my Will to embrace my destiny as an Autarch of the self. Raymundo was ready for anything—we could drive to the airport now and get me on the redeye to Miami, and from there on a boat to Puerto Rico. He had cousins everywhere; he knew people. He and Roderick were cousins, and they had cousins of cousins, a matrix of cousins draped over the continent. Nobody would ever find me. Bank robbers from the independence movement would protect me on his say-so. But after just fifteen minutes of fruitless driving around, some frantic comparing of notes, and a quick examination of my neck, I had Raymundo drop me off at St. Charles, back in Port Jeff. I wanted to see my grandmother, the stupid old bitch. Visiting hours were long over, but I’m practiced enough in the art of invisibility to walk past a bored receptionist who can’t even be bothered to look up from her Rosemary Rogers novel.
Grandma was unconscious, in a state deeper than sleep. Her bruises had ripened into strange purple fruit. I realized why my father had taken her. He knew I’d try to follow. Oh, you got a better plan for money than her? he’d shouted—that could have been about me, not Grandma’s Social Security check. He had wanted
to kill me at Bernstein’s house, with Chelsea watching or assisting. The Abyssal Eyeballs show had had an ad hoc quality that stank of Plan B. Chelsea saw me at the first show, figured I’d come to the second, and whistled for Dad and his coterie. Aram and Karen probably tipped off Riley that I’d be there. And it wasn’t as though I had any place else to go other than the show.
Except for where I was right then. And that’s how the cops found me.
There was a trial, and it was a short one as I had no lawyer. I hardly made the papers, which was shocking given the sensationalism of it all. A punk-rock Satanist kills her father, his lover, and a former lover of her own in a kinky bondage performance art piece with twenty-five witnesses. Oh, and guest-starring a teenage dirtbag and a real-live Puerto Rican gangbanger type who killed a promising graduate student. But the newspapers didn’t bite—certainly not Newsday, and not even the National Enquirer.
Geraldo Rivera, I would have even granted an interview to. Call me, Geraldo!
The dark hand of Riley was behind the media blackout, behind the utter absence of witnesses. I know because I was found guilty of three counts of second-degree manslaughter. The jury deliberated for just under two hours. My public defender was good for a few things. He got the judge to agree to allow me to wear a wig so that my Mohawk wouldn’t prejudice the jury. And I got to stay on Long Island, in the county lockup, despite three three-year sentences to be served consecutively. Wir bleiben hier.
We are staying here? We have stayed here. Here I am, now.
Now, I am the only surviving relative of my grandmother, who is basically a vegetable with a beating heart, and whose nurse wheels her in to see me once a month. It would have been cruel, to her, to ship me upstate. Not that she remembers me at all. Every time she is placed across from me, she asks who I am, and what I’m doing in prison. Every time, I tell her. Sometimes I start by saying, “I killed my father.” Sometimes I start by saying, “I killed your son.” Either way, she cries throughout the telling of my story, and doesn’t recognize herself in it, even when I tell of her scrabbling around in the dark while her son fucked a girl who looked just like me.
I get to wear my wig during visiting hours too. I think it helps Grandma deal with what I’m telling.
I never made Newsday, but Riley did. The Berlin Wall crumbled, as he predicted it would, just as I was put behind a thick set of walls here in the county lockup. I’m still far freer than the East Germans. I don't have to work and scrabble for my three hots and a cot—the Germans will, and they’ll suffer for it. Riley made sure of that. He was all over the Eastern bloc, working with the leaders of the fledgling states to integrate property rights into the new laws and constitutions of their governments. If you tilt your head toward the east, and listen closely, and believe with all your heart in an unseen hand, you can hear the sound of poker chips being scooped up and moved from there to here.
Riley’s personality profile appeared in the paper’s Sunday magazine. He wasn’t the cover story, but he got a color spread and four thousand words on what a genius he was. His right arm was a little chicken wing tucked up against his rib cage thanks to his accident, and the hole in his neck was obvious. Not as obvious as the permanent crease in my own, but I was pleased to have left my mark on his fucking throat. There was no mention of the occult, or even his college career save for his peculiar support of Barry Goldwater back in ’68.
“When everyone else was into free love, I was into loving freedom.” That’s an actual quote from the piece. How could anyone not want to force open his adorable little mouth, and vomit down his throat?
Riley’s hired wife was given a name in a caption: Dawn. They posed together, arm in arm, in their living room. On the far wall behind them hung Bernstein’s Tower painting. I am a fucking genius. The only one on Long Island, guaranteed. I always knew there was no such thing as j______. But here’s an inevitable happenstance I look forward to: Riley’s been able to move about the world unseen, thanks to his magick robe that makes him invisible to state operatives. Well, he’s working hard to eliminate the state and supplant it with a global marketplace. Soon, there will be no such thing as privacy, or subtlety. We’ll all be tawdry celebrities on perennial benders, and releasing Rob Lowe–style sex tapes purposefully, to publicize our careers. One day, someone will find out about Riley, and expose him, and by extension me, to the world. Occult means hidden, but in the New Aeon of the all-encompassing market, there will be no hiding.
On the tier I make myself useful. I can read and write, and have become a scribe of sorts to some of the other girls. I keep my head down, and as this is county, most girls come and go pretty quickly, while I’ve become an institution. I’m a loner in a web of gang and extended family associations, but it’s not so bad. If you keep your head down, and occasionally lick a little pussy, it’s not so bad at all. Since women in prison are the lowliest, and sexiest, of class strata, every Maoist and anarchist group tries to recruit us. I get to read a lot of revolutionary newspapers—none of them have any idea why the Berlin Wall fell, and all of them seem happy to blame one another’s lack of faith—and occasionally even receive a missive from Red Submarine. The endless repetition of the Mike Schmidt byline has been replaced by . . . nothing at all. Every article is anonymous. Now that’s Taoist Marxism: the role of the party chairman is taken up by a blank space whose purpose it is to fill the role of the party chairman and keep everyone else out.
I still listen to Outrage every Wednesday night, on a little transistor radio I hide under my pillow. Nobody dares try to take it from me.
Roderick visited me once. He told me he was going to move to California, and that he doesn’t dream of a great big snake anymore.
“What do you dream about?” I asked him.
He stared past me for a moment, as if looking over my shoulder and all away around the curve of the Earth to see into the back of his head. “Little snakes. Millions of them, necks tied to tails, like a net covering the whole world.”
“What are you going to do in California?”
He shrugged. “Something with computers maybe?”
“Make a little money, that sort of thing?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Cool.” And that was that. My not cursing him out was all the thanks he was going to get, and he was grateful for it. He blew me a kiss on the way out.
Greg, never heard from him again. Eh, who could blame the kid, really?
My official prison job is highway cleanup. I can no longer Will myself to invisibility. The COs with their shotguns, the girls in our bright orange Oompa-Loompa jumpsuits, we’re the only entertainment for the great and endless steel snake of Long Island Expressway traffic lines. Well, except for throwing shit out the windows. After my own failed experiment with it, I came to the conclusion that vegetarianism was a bourgeois affectation, something for people who benefit from current structures of oppression to agitate for. But now, after picking up my ten thousandth McDonald’s wrapper—and after eating as many veiny prison-grade hamburger patties that make McDonald’s taste like a Peter Luger steak—I was ready to eat the weeds.
And, as it turns out, I could. I was tearing up weeds on a traffic strip one day when I noticed a few different-looking greens.
“Hey, Michelle,” I said, holding up a fistful. “Ever see anything like this before?” Michelle’s an older woman, African American, a southerner. She got nailed selling her prescription medication to junkies at a five hundred percent markup. Because she was unincorporated and hadn’t made a public offering of stock in herself, they threw her in prison with me. At home, she loved to garden and to cook for her hundred screaming nephews and nieces.
Michelle never had any little ones of her own, but only because she’s an enormous dyke. I liked her.
“Bring it here, hold it out in front of you. Let me take a look,” Michelle said. Michelle always shouted like a third-grader at the school play when among the COs, so they wouldn’t beat her up. She was v
ery worried about her teeth. Prison dentures rarely fit well. She peered at the leaves. I let them go and the wind from a passing tractor-trailer took them to her; they fell like feathers at her feet.
“That’s amaranth, Dawnie,” she said. “The leaves. It’ll flower soon.”
“Amaranth grows wild on Long Island?” I was surprised.
Michelle shrugged. “You’re from here, girl. Don’t you know?”
“I couldn’t even identify the stuff with a bunch of it in my hands, Michelle.”
She chuckled. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. It’s weeds mostly, but some people eat it.”
“I know.”
The next day, I looked it up in the prison library. It’s mostly law books and romance novels, but they do have some newspapers. Amaranth grows just fine on Long Island; there just isn’t any. Or wasn’t any, according to Newsday, until Hurricane Hugo shanghaied some seeds from the south and dumped them on our shores. Amaranth means “never fading.” It was Bernstein’s name for me. Hurricane Hugo destroyed his home, and sent so much of his occult knowledge to the four winds. There are no coincidences, I know that. In times past, I would have retreated to my room to contemplate the plant and its connections to my life, to the spinning of the world, to the class struggle, but these days it’s hard to give a fuck about anything. I almost miss wiping Grandma’s ass sometimes, miss driving the Rabbit, and definitely miss peering through windows made of something other than crisscrossed wires. I destroyed myself, and for what? The man who killed Bernstein is striding across the planet like a colossus, remaking it in his own image, and harnessing Bernstein’s power to do it.
Another storm is coming. There’s no highway duty today, because of Hurricane Bob. It—no, he—has already chewed through the Carolinas, Maryland, and Jersey, and left a billion dollars of damage in his wake. Destruction, but not creative destruction, not capitalist destruction, and now Bob is bearing down on Long Island. I cannot help but picture him as Killer BOB from Twin Peaks, entire towns grinding between his big tombstone teeth. Twin Peaks was a favorite on the tier last year. We have a TV, HBO even, but it’s not like we each get a tube in our cell. There’s the tier proper, and its row of cells, a slim walkway surrounding it that we all have access to when the doors open in the morning, and another, larger, cage around all of us. On the other side of that cage, bolted to the far wall, is the TV. Good luck trying to get the remote control from whatever badass has claimed it for the day. When the batteries die from the incessant clicking around, we have to wait a day or three for one of the COs to replace them. One time the TV was stuck on TV-55 for a week. I was surprised there were no suicides.
