by Mark Teppo
"How? That's impossible. We just opened your eyes. We didn't have a chance to guide you. You barely saw the Tree. How could you find the back pathways? I don't understand what happened."
"I fell through Daath, Kat. I met one of them in the woods. I met a serpent who walked like a man, and he stuck his tongue through the hole in my spirit. He told me shadows could get into my soul, and there was only one way to keep them out."
"Keep them out? How?"
I let her see the Chorus. I raised them up and lit them with fiery incandescence. The walls responded in kind and, for a second, the room was filled with a kaleidoscopic orgasm of moving light. The color bleached out of Kat's skin, her skull visible. Her hair was a black cloud about her head and her eyes glittered like diamonds trapped in ragged stone. She Saw me. I had no doubt. "Dear Goddess," she whispered, her voice echoing in the sudden extinction of light.
She was quiet a long time. "You've been lost ever since that night, haven't you?" Her hand touched my foot, and her fingers were so warm I almost cried out from the shock. "He touched you, and you listened to him. I am so sorry. You've been carrying this poison all that time."
Her warmth spread through my ankle and heel, melting the permafrost in my toes. The heat spread to my calf like sunlight warming the core of a rock. On the wall, the white line of letters began to glow, a faint luminescence that outlined the shape of her head and body. "Was it all his voice that you heard? Was there any of your own desire in your heart?"
"I don't know. I can't remember." My body began to shake, deep sobs rising up from some long-covered wellspring.
"Has this violence been the only thing you've wanted, Markham? Has there been anything else? Try to remember. There is still a void in you. Just because you've expelled him doesn't mean he can't come back. You have to fill the void yourself. You have to remember something that has always been yours. What have you been seeking all this time? It hasn't been me. What have you wanted?"
Peace, I tried to tell her, but my teeth were chattering too hard. As her hand climbed to my knee, I reached down and grabbed her wrist, pulling her into my embrace like a drowning man grabbing a scrap of flotsam. My mouth found its way, my lips tasting her skin. Her fragrance-oh, memory is such a shabby thing when confronted with the aroma of a living scent-flooded through the crust of blood in my nose. The inhaled aphrodisiac went straight to the cold part of my brain and started wildfires.
We had fucked a lot when we were dating, animal movements in the light and night of our lives. We fucked because we were young, bodies so easily inflamed by the desire to touch and taste. We weren't the type whose sexual encounters lasted for hours and broke furniture and annoyed the neighbors and left us dehydrated husks on the floor. We were just enthusiastic about putting our parts together in various rhythmic combinations.
The sex was the intersection of our lives, the common denominator linking us. Her friends were prone to discussions about mysticism and meditative states reached through pharmaceutical psychology. They tended to be nocturnal-lovers of libraries and dark coffee houses, wan and wide-eyed in daylight. Mine were outdoor enthusiasts: climbers, BASE jumpers, skiers. We loved the rain and the weather, the play of light on snow, the crisp emptiness found far from concrete.
There was some overlap in the pharmaceutical area but, for the most part, our relationship fed the aspects of our psyches unfulfilled by our choices in friends and companions. I was the philosopher among the climbers, the one most prone to wonder why we wanted to climb up to Heaven and touch the stars in the night sky. She was unafraid of rocks and trees and air untainted by the heavy pressure of burned fossil fuels.
We met at REI; I was working a summer job there, helping out with the climbing wall. She approached me, on a lark she said, and asked how the whole climbing thing worked. I had put her in one of the harnesses and let her try the first few handholds. She had caught me looking at her ass.
Later, lying in bed, she confessed she had only come into the store to meet me. "The Hermit at the base of the mountain," she had said, explaining in her way what sight had lured her into the store. It was years later, when I learned about the tarot from a scarred astrologer in Budapest, that I understood what she had been telling me.
Katarina and I had always made love like we were trying to bridge some gap, like we were struggling to complete a puzzle we didn't even realize we were trying to solve. We were frenetic in our movement: grasping, pulling, pushing, tugging-always moving in opposition. In the brief fusion brought about by orgasm, we experienced a momentary glimpse of the solution-the top of the puzzle box where the picture was complete-and the sight always left us on the verge of understanding. Always close; never realized. Our quest of the flesh eternally incomplete.
Both of us had been with other people in the interim. Now, in the steel prison, our histories showed in the tiny hesitations that interrupted our motion, in the instinctual manner in which we found and forgot our rhythms, in the familiar way we drank from the hollows of our throats and shallow pools of our collarbones as we became thirsty. She bit me on the shoulder, breaking the skin, and I dented the flesh beneath the high point of her pelvic arch with my thumb. She sighed when she came and I held on, greedily wanting to bring her to that point again. She laughed and gripped me tight, flexing her hips and back until I cried out.
When all the hate was gone, what was left wasn't love, but just the memory of presence. What was left was an imprint of connectivity. We had sought to be one once, and the failure of that quest held no negative connotation. It was simply part of what moved us. We fucked like old friends who finally figured out that physical touch was as intimate as we were ever going to be. With that realization came a certain amount of grace.
XV
Where did you go?" she asked later, curled up next to me. We were a tiny island on a steel sea, a bare bump of bone and flesh. We lay together because two were warmer than one and because there was no distance between us anymore. Until the container was opened, we existed outside of time and the world. We both knew it wouldn't last.
"A lot of places. Canada, the Southwest, back East. I saw a lot of Europe. China. Indonesia. Africa. I spent a year in Finland and two years in Paris."
Her fingers moved across my collarbone and touched the braid of hair around my throat. "And this?"
"Finland."
She tried to hook her finger under the braid and discovered that it wasn't separate from my skin. "What is it?"
"It's a gift from someone I-She helped me through the first year, showed me magick." Reija had named them; more than just a label, her binding had given them definition, and in doing so, had made them controllable. She had tried to teach me strength. "It's her hair."
"A forget-me-not?" Nearly a teasing note in Kat's voice.
"Yes, but not like that."
She quietly traced the course of the braid. The Chorus boiled at her touch. While their Qliphotic source had been expelled, the soil down there was still tainted, still ripe with their desire. She shivered slightly as she felt the skin of my chest and neck twitch.
"I quit all the magick stuff for three or four years after the ceremony that night," she said eventually. As the Chorus stopped raising goose bumps on my skin, her finger idly drifted along the slope of my body, charting the twists and knots of the last decade. "The group dissolved after the raid and we all lost touch. Adrift. ."
Her memories of the ceremonial initiation had flowed into me when I had attacked her earlier, filling the holes that had been torn in my history. Now, I could remember the chaos of the Forest Service raid, the uniformed men with flashlights who had interrupted the nocturnal rite. Kat's group at that time had been pagan Gaia worshippers, attempting to link their Western Druidic heritage with the animist spirits of the natural world, and they had returned one too many times to the same spot outside of Rockport. The solemn ceremony had been splintered by the sudden presence of Forest Service rangers and Sheriff's deputies. The acolytes panicked, abandoning all
pretense of ceremonial unity, and the torch-lit glade had dissolved into a scene of medieval chaos. Myself and the two other neophytes had been left behind, wide-eyed babes abandoned in the woods. Left to face our panic on our own.
I shifted my leg, sliding my foot between her calves. She parted easily, effortlessly, and unconsciously, and then closed again around me. "But you came back to the Work."
She nodded. "I did." She seemed on the cusp of telling me more and I said nothing, letting the silence draw it out of her. "I traveled too. I did the Grand Tour of Italy: Rome, Venice, Florence, a few other places." I felt her cheek move against my skin-a brush of warm flesh-and I knew why the memories caused such a flush in her. Venice was a haunted city. Its filigreed buildings, its burnished glass, and its emerald canals still inflamed the romantic idealist. I hadn't been immune myself, and gotten involved in an affair that had taught me some different things than I had come to find.
"When I came back, I found some of the old group. They had become Hollow Men, though they used another name back then. 'Technomancers,' I think. Or 'Argent Lords of the Dawn.' " She shook her head, her hair brushing against my chin. "They went through quite a few names before 'Hollow Men.' They had become city-bound, neo-industrialists, and they were scattered along the coast in Portland and Seattle. Urban chaos magicians without any real focus."
Doug and his friends. The white-haired magus. "But they found a focus in psychoanimism, didn't they?"
She nodded. "Yes, manipulating the soul, independent of the flesh. Shortly after I came back, they became involved with a couple of magi who had recently completed pilgrimages to India and were heavily into Vedic meditation. They had a handful of prayers they claimed were from the Artharva Veda. Ritual chants to cleanse and purify the spirit, to de-foul the materialistic flesh."
"Your friends found gurus."
"Yes," she admitted. "I was still on the fringe, not completely privy to the thoughts of the inner circle. I wasn't part of the decision to bind the group to these men."
"What was the lure? It had to be more than scraps from the Artharva Veda." There were a lot of rituals claiming that lineage; I had never seen one that could actually hold up to any scrutiny.
"They claimed to have found a synthesis between these rituals and the Work described in an eighth-century Persian alchemical text. They were working from the Latin translation-fourteenth or fifteenth century, I think-and they had made a purification rite. A unified expression of being and not-being. It was complicated: two days of fasting and meditation before another twelve hours of ceremonial magick. Lots of sigils, lots of mantras."
Her finger traced the pitted circle of one of two bullet scars. I had taken a couple of small caliber rounds in the chest-high on the right side-a few years ago. An art negotiation gone wrong in a no-name Bangkok bar had left me with holes, one clean through and one puncturing the upper portion of my right lung. The wound in my lung had threatened to be a problem but the shooter, having had an instant to regret his aim, was taken by the Chorus and used to repair the damage. The enduring legacy of my Qliphotic infection.
"I had been tracing the history of pagan Goddess worship in Italy," she said, her fingers wandering between the scars on my chest. "I found some old ceremonies belonging to Demeter, one of which was the practice of tuning spirit fields." Her hand paused and her head moved, her breath touching my skin. "A harmonic resonance between souls."
I touched her shoulder, felt her hair under my fingers. "Synching energy vibrations," I said. My knowledge of the matter was vague, and based on what I gleaned from Doug's head, I could hazard a few guesses.
"The Hollow Men ritual culminates in a spiritual readiness-a sartorial condition where the initiate is etherically disengaged. The body is alive, but in a state of suspension, and the soul should be able to release itself freely from its anchors.
"But when they tried to put it into practice, they couldn't do it. They couldn't complete the process of separation. They knew what they needed-some sort of final release that would silence the self-but they couldn't do it. They couldn't do it for themselves."
I made the connection. "And this is where you came in."
"The ceremony of Demeter gave me the tools to become a co-participant in their ritual. I could tune their vibrations. I could focus their bodies and dissolve their active minds."
"Sex Magick," I said. "The old-fashioned way."
"There's nothing old-fashioned about it." She sounded slightly defensive, even though my tone had been light. "You know how oblivious we are to ourselves in that moment of rapture. Sex Magick is just as viable as any other style of theurgy."
"I know," I told her. "There are aged generations of Thelemites who are still trying to live up to Crowley's interpretations. Love under Will as long as you are bowing to My Will and all that." Crowley's interpretation was decidedly English and male, which subsumed a great deal of the more ancient fertility rituals. The kind that Kat had apparently found.
"Crowley gets it all wrong because he never Saw beyond the end of his dick." She shook her head, her hair moving through my fingers. "It isn't just about reaching orgasm and seeing that white light of nothingness. When I give them that release, they are submissive to me. I am their Whore-Goddess; I am the fertile earth in which they bury themselves so that their spirits may be freed. We re-create the burial of the vegetable god. It is this symbolic harmony that allows them to pass into simultaneous Being and Nothingness."
The vegetable ritual, the oldest example of the Hermetic truism. As above, so below. The natural cycle reflected in the world mythologies. Goddesses take suitors from the mortal world and give them divine providence by allowing them to plow the sacred field with their profane cocks. Inanna and Tammuz. Aphrodite and Adonis. Cybele and Attis. This is the way Kings were made. This is the way Kings were buried.
I had been bound by this cycle as well. The Chorus had tapped that proto-historical model, that ingrained psychic belief structure, and had bent me around it. We seek death and rebirth as often as the sun rises. We seek to create and re-create, covering our mistakes, burying our errors, hoping-next time-we would get it right. What had my quest for Kat been but a distorted attempt at the same thing? In our aborted chemical romance, I had been a Black King-charred and improperly cast-to her Red Queen.
Her hand moved down, and she found the ridged scar where Antoine's blade had gone through me. It had slipped under my rib cage and pierced my back, just missing my spine. A clean thrust that would have been fatal had it been a half-inch either way. But it hadn't, and Antoine had been as surprised as I. It was his one mistake. And it only cost him a hand.
"Why do you keep the scars?" she asked. "Do you not know how to repair your flesh?"
"I do," I said. "But they help me remember."
"Remember what? The pain?"
"My mortality."
She was quiet for a moment. "They think pscyhoanimism can be used to extend life," she said, idly rubbing the sword scar as if it were just an applique that could be removed. "They've done things I thought impossible. And the texts they have hint at many more possibilities: group minds, cosmic consciousnesses-"
"Body-jacking," I interrupted.
Her finger stopped. "Yes," she said. She said it quietly, as if verbal recognition of my words would be heard as an admission of guilt. "They can move between bodies. It wasn't something I taught them. It was Julian's-"
"Who?"
She ignored the question and, for the moment, I let it go. I had a sense-a taste-of which one was Julian. I had pinned his spirit in the hotel when he had tried his psychic assault. The white-haired one. I know your name.
Her hand drifted back up my chest and stopped over my heart. Her wrist turned as if she were trying to put her fingers in the dial of an old rotary telephone. "Here," she said. "This is where I touched you. I can feel it in your aura."
She moved her hand away, leaving five glowing rings on my skin like stars writ across the heavens. Coupled with the pale sc
ars of the bullet wounds, the pattern looked like the constellation of Orion. The Hunter drawn at a downward angle as if the sky were tilting.
"Ex lux et vita," she whispered.
From light and life. The world unmade and made anew in a flash of light. A sudden pain pierced my throat like an arrow from Eros' bow gone terribly astray. For the last ten years, my persistent memory loop had been a false precognition, a bogus prediction wrapped around an imperfect imprint of the ceremony in the woods.
Archaic cultures would regularly gather at their sacred spots-their places of epiphany-and re-create their symbolic worlds. These magico-religious spots were where Now and Then collapsed into a singular point-in illo tempore. They would compress the world and make it anew. Ex lux et vita. Those at the center-at the axis of their world-got to make the future.
Even as I had tried to consciously forget Katarina in the subsequent decade since my aborted magickal initiation, I couldn't escape the cyclical nature of the world. Unconsciously, I wanted to return to the beginning. I wanted to restart my world.
This was the divine secret whispered to me in the woods. This was the First Lie I told myself. There was no Qliphoth monster, no serpent, no dark demiurge in the woods. Just my own frightened spirit staring up at the sky and seeing only darkness. I hadn't been able to see the pinpricks of Heaven. There had been no reflection, no way for me to remember that I, too, was a star.
The fire is going out, I whispered to myself in the woods, and there is only one way to preserve it. Take more fuel. Gather more sparks. Light begats light.
Thus the seed was planted, buried deep by my own hand. By my own ignorance.
Kat's hand moved to my lips, and then to my cheeks where she felt my tears. "I'm sorry," she whispered, pressing her lips to the five circles over my heart.
