by J. R. Mabry
Brian blinked, trying to take that in. “Okay, so if the you in Malkuth is in Tahoe, why aren’t you in this world’s Tahoe?”
She lowered one eye at him. “This world doesn’t have a Tahoe, dear. Or a Berkeley or a San Francisco. We have entirely different political systems, financial systems—”
“I noticed the money,” Brian interjected.
She nodded. “Plus, space and time work differently here. You’ll find spatial relationships distorted, at least according to your sensibilities. Things that look small will seem bigger inside and vice versa.” She took a bite of a cookie.
“I’ve noticed there’s a lot of machinery here. I’ve never seen a place with so many ducts and hoses and gears and…little boxes with fans in them and such.”
“You’re welcome, dear,” she smiled. A part of a cookie clung to her lower lip.
Brian tried not to look at it. “Um…welcome for what?”
“They stuff all the machinery that makes Malkuth work up here in Yesod. We barely have room for our own anchovy tins—you know why? Because half of our cupboard space is taken up with your electric wiring and chutes and levers and Jesus’ pajamas.”
“But why is that? How could it—?”
“Do you think electricity just works? No. It’s all finagled from here. And when the internet went in, good God man, suddenly we had all these government men crawling around our flats installing all this naff ductwork. ‘For the good of the Mals,’ they say. ‘Oh, yes, by all means, for the Mals,’ we answer. Bloody ductwork, in through here, through the wall there, up through the floors, bloody ductwork coming out of my twat—all to carry your messages and those stinking Black Friday adverts.”
“But that’s all just electronic,” Brain objected.
“Don’t fookin’ rub it in,” Maggie slammed her fist on the table. She continued in a mocking, sing-song voice, “It’s just electronic, nice and neat—nice and neat my scabied ass! The internet is a series of tubes, my son, and where do you think those tubes actually reside? In Yesod!”
Brian wanted to shrink under the table. “Sorry. I didn’t know.”
Maggie’s fury seemed to melt away as quickly as it had risen. “Oh, it’s not your fault, dear. You’re just clueless.”
Brian nodded—because he was, and he didn’t know what else to say.
“All that machinery isn’t pretty, but it’s how we pull our weight,” she smiled sweetly at him. “You’ll get used to it…if you spend any time here, that is.”
“I hope not to,” Brian said, a little tentatively. “I’m not here for vacation. I’m looking for someone.”
“A magickian?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Because it’s always a magickian. He was here yesterday. He may still be here. I don’t know.”
“Did you meet him?”
“No. I didn’t need to. I noticed.”
“So things have been falling apart since yesterday?”
Maggie cocked her head at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean the bridges, I guess. The fact that no one talks to anyone else. The arguments. The...sterility.”
“Oh no, that's just you.”
Brian drew back. “What do you mean?”
“You aren’t seeing this world the way it is. You're seeing it the way you are.”
“Anaïs Nin said that.”
“And she was right. You are disconnected, so the bridges are out. You aren’t communicating well, so people aren't talking to you.”
“But they're not. They’re not talking to me. At all.”
“Yes, dear.” Maggie smiled sweetly, aggravatingly. “I also noticed your shoelaces. Something's going on there. Did you and Terry split up?”
Brian swallowed, and he felt water rise to his eyes. “I…we did. Kind of.”
“Oh, dear. I thought as much. I am sorry. You were like two bangers in a bun.” She sighed. “What is interior reality in your world has an external manifestation in this one. Everything in this world is a little more...rarified than you're used to. It's the outer of the inner, so to speak.”
“Meaning?”
“Don’t be stupid, dear,” she said, waving a gnarled hand at him. “You know very well what I mean.”
“So the bridge wasn’t really out?”
“It was really out.”
Brian shook his head, confused.
“It isn’t all about you,” Maggie scolded him. “Sometimes how you feel and how things actually are line up, you know.”
“So how do you tell which is which and where the line is?”
“Hang in there,” she patted his hand, “you’ll get your sea legs.”
Brian wasn’t sure he would, but she had given a him lot to think about. “So what was it like when Larch was here?”
“Larch? Ah, you must mean the magickian,” Maggie nodded. “I imagine he saw it as most magickians see it. Total chaos.”
“Because the chaos is inside of them?” Brian asked.
“You get a gold star,” she said. “And another biscuit.” She reached for a bright red tin on the table and pulled it open, offering it to Brian. He pulled half a broken shortbread cookie out of it and nibbled at it.
“The girl at the store,” Brian said. “She asked me if I was a magickian.”
“We get a lot of visitors here, more than you might think.”
“I would think most of them would be Jews, though.”
“Yes. Mostly Jews, but they never make a fuss, and they mostly go to synagogue to pray. The ones flashing money around, getting liquored up, and trying to get laid? Those are usually magickians. They’re the ones who get into trouble. An unsavory lot, in my opinion.”
“She felt at my arm. What was that about?”
“Checking for ointment,” Maggie said.
“Ointment?”
“Kelipot ointment. To mask one’s intentions,” Maggie said. “You don’t need it because you’re not hiding anything. Your intentions are good. And that,” she twisted the end of his nose, “is as clear as the honker on your face.”
“Because this is the outer of the inner?” he asked, feeling his nose. She’d given it a good twist.
“Precisely. No one is going to bother you here. But if you were up to no good, that would be obvious, too.”
“So I’d want to mask that…if I were up to no good.”
“Yes. Kelipot ointment. It’s kind of a concealment spell. A glamor.”
Brian nodded. “That makes sense. The Kabbalists speak of kelipot as a kind of shell that conceals holiness. I suppose it could conceal evil intent just as well. In our world there have been terrible repercussions. The divorce rate has gone through the roof. Couples everywhere are fighting.”
“Yes, it’s very sad,” she said. “Malkuth is displaying the outer of our inner, it seems. Very unusual. Oh, well, it will all be over soon.”
“What do you mean?” Brian asked, hopeful. “Will these effects just dissipate?”
“What? No, don’t be silly,” Maggie said. “This whole world is about to collapse, and it will take Malkuth with it.”
Brian froze, mid-sip. He set the cup back down. “Maggie, what on earth do you mean by that?”
“Come,” she said. She led him to her front door, then smacked at her head. “Damn, I should bring the specs.” She went to a bookshelf, stuffed to bursting with much more than books. From a shelf near the bottom, she grabbed a pair of binoculars. Then she waddled over to the front door again, opened it, and waved for him to follow her.
She led him up five flights of stairs. Brian was amazed at her alacrity and embarrassed that he was so quickly winded. At the top, they reached a metal door. Maggie pushed it open and led him onto a roof. The rain seemed to have let up for the moment, but water stood in puddles every couple of feet. Maggie led him to the far edge, stepping over the ducts and boxes with fans in them with far more agility that she should have been able to manage. When they reached the railing they were facing the g
reenbelt. She handed him the binoculars and pointed. “There. Look there.”
He held the binoculars to his eyes and adjusted them. “What am I looking at? The lingam?”
“Yes. Do you see it?”
“I see it.”
“Now, very slowly, look down. What do you see when you get near the ground?”
“Um…it looks like a construction crew. It looks like the lingam is still under construction.”
“You’re half right, dear. It’s a demolition crew. They’re dismantling the zayin.”
“But…why?” Brian lowered the binoculars.
“Why do people ever do stupid, tragic things?” Maggie asked.
“Is that rhetorical?” Brian asked.
“No. Please answer the question.”
“Why do people do stupid, tragic things?” Brian repeated. “Because they’re bad?”
“Did you get thicker when you crossed the threshold of the worlds?” Maggie asked. “People don’t do stupid, tragic things because they’re bad, you ninny, they do them because they’re scared.”
“Of course they do,” Brian felt like an idiot. “And why are they scared?”
“Now you’re asking intelligent questions,” Maggie said. “They’re scared because some asshole magickian got online and started fabricating news stories about an army of magickians in Malkuth full of evil intent crossing over into Yesod with the express purpose of disrupting our society with lies about kidnappings and bombings and political scandal and whatnot. Your…Larch, was it? Your Larch took several pages from the terrorist’s DIY playbook, not to mention the Russians and right-wing nut jobs, and posted all kinds of fabrications and innuendos, poisoning our society with suspicion and distrust and threats of violence.”
Brian felt like his head was spinning. “But there is a magickian full of evil intent, he did cross over, and he is poisoning your society with suspicion and so forth—he’s actually talking about himself.”
“Yes, his only real distortion, it seems, was suggesting he was legion.”
“Online, you can pretend to be anyone else. I guess you can pretend to be more numerous, too.”
“Just so.”
“So they’re dismantling the lingam in order to…what?”
“To sever the connection to Malkuth.”
Brian felt like he’d been punched in the gut. “Wait, whoa. If you sever the connection to Malkuth, our world—our universe—just winks out of existence.”
“Well, not exactly, but close enough. You’ll be cut off from the divine energies that give your universe its contingent existence. Imagine that your world is the pod at the end of an enormous Habitrail. This lingam is the tube through which all your air, all your water, all your light, and all your energy travels to your little pod. Remove the tube and…well, you got not much of anything, do you? No energy, so no suns, no stars, no light. You got no communication—because all symbolic connections, all meaning is fed to you from the higher sephirot down through the zayin into Malkuth. Sever that tube and you got nothing but a husk. And even that won’t last long.”
Brian felt chills run up and down his spine. “But why would Larch do something like that?”
“I’m not sure he intended that particular outcome. He just wanted to throw us into chaos, and he did that handily enough—the papers have been filled with ‘magickian hysteria’ ever since, which must have tickled his testicles delightfully. None of our proper work has gotten done in the past twenty-four hours, which is probably why you’re seeing those effects in your world. Yesod is all about connection—the connection between your world and the higher sephirot, the connection between language and meaning, the connection between people at every level of society, but most keenly within families. So if we’re not doing the work of connection here, then connection isn’t happening there.”
“And when the connection is broken completely…”
“It’s like a heart attack. Right now, you got clogged arteries. When the blockage is complete…”
“We die.”
“Bingo!”
Brian felt faint, and he sat down on the roof. He felt water from one of the puddles seep into his jeans. The cold felt good, bracing. “How do we stop it?”
“Well, how do you stop frightened people trying to protect themselves? I don’t know the answer to that.” Maggie looked at him with profound compassion.
“We could do a press conference, set the story straight,” Brian said.
“Sure. The Reformed Catholic priest-lady and her Jewish friend. We might get three of my neighbors to attend, but only if we serve scones.”
“I feel so helpless.” He leaned over and rested his head on her shoulder.
“I know just how you feel,” she said as she caressed his temple with gnarled fingers.
“What do we do?”
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to finish my tea.”
74
Rachel screamed. Evans’ mouth dropped open and Martinez crossed himself.
Richard swallowed hard. Rachel stood up, still screaming. She seemed to have come completely unglued. Richard sprang at her and knocked her to the floor before a spray of buckshot took out the glass in the cabinet doors behind them. “Stay down,” he said, allowing his full weight to pin her to the floor.
“Ben!” she sobbed. “They killed Ben…”
Richard realized that he hadn’t known the man’s name until just now. He had simply thought of him as the hipster guy. But now he was Ben. And Ben’s brains were splattered across the tile. Richard couldn’t see either of the policemen, but he knew they could hear him. “Two things: we’ve gotta distract the Olivos, and we’ve gotta destroy that sigil.”
“How are we going to do that?” Martinez asked.
“I’m thinking that the two of you need to pay them a visit, and let them know that one of their other neighbors has won a prize, but they aren’t home. Ask if you can leave notice with the Olivos instead.”
“What kind of prize?” Evans asked.
“I don’t know, make something up. But it has to be something big—like a house in France or a couple million dollars or something.”
“Won it how?”
“Do I have to do everything? Do you guys have a policeman’s annual raffle or something?”
“No.”
“Well, pretend you do. Make it big. Make it convincing. Make it something that will really spark their envy. Big enough that they’ll stop thinking about their backyard neighbors long enough for me and Tobias to find the sigil.”
“How will you know that it’s safe?”
“We all have radios—can you just hold down your transmit button so that I can hear what’s happening?”
“Sure, I can talk and Martinez can hold the line open,” Evans said. Richard imagined that Martinez must be nodding his agreement.
“Okay, then let’s get moving. Rachel, I’m going to move off you now. Will you stay down?”
Below him he heard snuffling, and then a weak “Yes.”
He rolled off onto the floor and sat up, being careful not to put his hand down on any shards. He wondered how Toby was doing with all the glass but saw that the dog had wisely kept to the area just in front of the door that was blessedly glass-free.
“How does a visiting professor get guns?” Martinez asked.
“Maybe he’s renting the house,” Evans said. “And the owner has a stash of guns.”
“Maybe,” Martinez agreed. “Not a lot of guns in Berkeley, though.”
“More than I ever thought there were,” Evans said, shaking his head. Then they were gone, duck-walking past Tobias and keeping their heads low.
Rachel had withdrawn into a corner and had curled nearly into a ball. She stared at what remained of Ben and shivered. Richard wanted to comfort her but didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t safe to clean anything up, and it wasn’t clear to him that a hug was what she needed most right now. Instead, he stayed in leadership mode. “You stay right there
,” he told her, with as much authority as he could muster. “Whatever you do, don’t stand up.”
Richard crawled over to the back door and, positioning himself with his back to the wall, he swung it open into the room. The Olivos noticed the motion, and several bullets punched into the far wall. Richard leaned out a bit and saw that just beyond the back door was a porch with a waist-high railing. If he stayed low enough, he could move out onto the porch without being seen. He scuttled out the door and held it open. “Toby, come.”
Richard was glad he couldn’t see Toby as he made his way across the glass-strewn floor because he’d wince at every step. But Toby must have picked his way carefully through the mess, because he successfully navigated to the porch without trailing any blood from his paws—not even Ben’s blood.
“Well done, boy,” Richard said in a whisper, although he didn’t know why he was whispering. Richard turned to face the house behind them and unslung his rifle, setting it down on the gray painted floor of the porch. Then, steeling himself, he raised up so that just his eyes cleared the railing. To his great relief, the Olivos didn’t seem to notice. Just then his radio sprung to scratchy life. He heard a loud, authoritative knock.
He looked at the Olivos house quickly. He half expected to see a sigil spray-painted on the back of their house, but no—it was a well-kept Victorian with nary a demonic tag in sight.
“What do you…officer…” a voice with a thick Italian accent came through the radio.
Richard crouched back down and turned to look up at the house he was in. It was clean, too. Where the fuck…? he thought. There must be a sigil here somewhere.
“Sir, I’m so sorry to bother you. But we’re pleased to inform you that your neighbor, right over there beside you—”
“Miss Lessing?” the man asked.
“Yes, that’s her. Miss Lessing. Miss Lessing has won the Berkeley PD Sweepstakes this year.”
“She has?”
“Who is it, Arturo?” came another voice, this one higher. His wife, perhaps?
Tobias was sniffing at the wind and seemed to have caught a scent. Richard raised his eyes just above the railing and looked in the direction the dog was sniffing in. And then he saw it. Spray painted on the basketball backboard fixed to the garage was a sigil. It wasn’t one that Richard recognized, but then again he’d never spent much time studying envy demons—there didn’t seem to be a point. Richard squinted, trying to find the activated scrap—and saw something fluttering, attached to the rim by…what? A clothespin? Maybe. It was too far to see it, and Richard’s vision wasn’t what it used to be, no matter what he told himself.
