Incompatible

by Mauricio R B Campos

  The tattooist stared at her friend, who was wearing a black top with the logo of Ramones, the large collar showed parts of her brassiere of red lace. There must be someone in whom she’s interested here today, Bia never wears anything so sexy, she thought. Coming from the room, she recognized Lana Del Rey’s music, High by the Beach.

  “Hum, how come?” she asked somebody on the phone “Yes, it’s police stuff.” — She answered, after a pause! — “Done for!”

  “What’s up? Who was it?”

  Bia only said come and ran out of the room. Her friend headed to the illuminated room, bothered by the light, where there were people all around, there should be some fifteen people there, sharing the joint that burnt and spread smoke in the environment. She recognized some faces.

  “Pimenta! Pimenta, dickhead, where are you, son of a bitch!” Bia screamed entering the room, the sudden way and the tremor in her voice denounced something was too wrong. She looked around and without finding the so-called Pimenta she went to the other room of the apartment. When she pushed the handle, she screamed in panic as stridently as the whistle of a boiling kettle.

  The tattooist went to the door of the room and a shiver took her spine: there was a boy lying down in the floor, he did not seem to be eighteen years old. He was prostrated with the body lying in a strange manner, like a lost puppet. Beside him, there was a girl aged about sixteen years of age, in despair.

  “The last thing I need is a corpse in the middle of the room!”

  “What the fuck did you take?”, Bia asked. “Shit! Fuck! Answer!” She shouted. In the room someone turned off the music and a heavy silence was established, being penetrated by the smoke that put everything in peace.

  The girl that was kneeling beside the body made a foolish expression, a mix of pain and absence, as if thinking gave her intestinal colic. She frowned:

  “We smoked key[10]...” she whispered.

  The two of them took the guy, one by the arms and the other by the legs.

  “It was Cesar on the phone. She clarified.” He said he was arriving at the building and saw the father of the boy, he’s trying to get in the building, he says he will search the entire building to find him.

  When they passed with the body by the room, the tattooist asked them to put out the joints, hide the drugs and did not leave the apartment nor turn on any music, she said there was a police officer in the building. She had rather screamed the building was in flame: the bustle would have been lower. She began to struggle and some of them ran to the door, but they were prevented by others, who said in the corridor they would be easy target for the police, it’s better waits in the apartment locked.

  The two of them went to the kitchen carrying Pimenta and from there they accessed the service elevator. As they were tired, they released the body on the floor and pressed the button for the twentieth-first floor.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Let’s go to the terrace, it will be the last place where they will look for the boy. Who’s the guy?”

  “He’s friends with my cousin, the stupid girl who was with him.”

  “Is he alive?”

  They starred at the unconscious boy on the floor. They could hardly see that he was breathing. Bia lowered and stuck her face by the face of the little boy to feel his breathing.

  “He’s alive, but he fell on the hole of key”, she explained.

  “I get surprise with your knowledge on illegal substances, Bia. What does it mean? They’ve always told me key is a trick.”

  “It’s a pain reliever, but he might have thrilled and smoked too much, thinking the more he smoked the higher the travel would be. It happens a lot...”

  The door of the elevator opened, and they took the boy again.

  “Just in case, press the button for the fifth floor before we leave, only to disguise.”

  The door closed and they heard the sound of the elevator moving downwards behind the door closed. The architecture student took the key and opened the side door where there was the warning of STRICT ACCESS, and thanked Cesar’s idea to steal a copy of this door in the building’s reception. He liked to smoke marijuana looking the city from height. They went up two flights of stairs with difficulty and stopped sometimes to recover their breathing. When they were almost at the top of the stairs, the head of the boy knocked at the corner of a step. “Ops.”

  They opened the door that led to the terrace and released the body at their feet. They felt the breeze of the night and closed the door behind them.

  “Is he over eighteen?”, the red-haired girl asked.

  “His birthday was last week.”

  “What now?”

  “I don’t know, let’s wait. As much as I know about key, he’s going to be there until the body eliminates everything. He will soon puke like he’s never done. Wait a minute, my phone is ringing, it’s Cesar. Hi, Cesar? We’re in the terrace with the boy. Yes... uhum...yes...good idea. Ok, I got it, we will do it”, she turned off and turning to her friend she said the cinema student had said the guy was knocking on every door looking for his son; he knew the boy was in the building because they were monitoring his whereabouts by geolocalization on the iPhone.

  Cesar asked them to find the smartphone and destroy it.

  They reached the unconscious boy and found his mobile phone in his pocket.

  “Let’s remove the chip, I think the sign will disappear”, Bia suggested.

  “I don’t know, I have a better idea, I hope it will work take of your tshirt” she asked.

  “Why mine?”

  “He’s friends with your cousin, isn’t he?”

  She took off the t-shirt with a sad face. The tattooist took the phone, rolled it up in the t-shirt and made a knot keeping the phone in the tshirt rolled up like a ball. She walked up to the wall of the building and, holding herself on the sill, she looked downwards. An open truck was approaching. Do you think I could launch the phone within the skip? By calculating mentally, the distance and the trajectory, she stretched her arm and released the object that went down whirling and hit the empty skip reverberating a metallic sound by the street.

  “Shit! My Ramones t-shirt, Jean!”

  “Yes, Bia, take a look”, she said indicating the truck that approached slowly.” If the phone isn’t damaged, this shitty policeman will soon think the boy escaped and will get out of here.

  Her friend saw the truck turning the distant corner.

  “Where did you take this idea of throwing the phone in the t-shirt?”

  “Didn’t you watch The da Vinci Code? They do something like this in the movie”.

  “The truck might as well be going to Arujá or somewhere like it.”

  Jean stared at her friend and noticed the lace brassiere:

  “Beautiful brassiere, do you have any crush in the party?”

  Bia passed her hand by the red strap and stared at the city, keeping quiet for a moment:

  “We’ve been through hard situations together, haven’t we? Since the very first day, on the hazing.”

  “Yeah, it seems to be part of life.”

  They sat leaning on a wall of the building and a cigarette was lit. They looked at the airplanes on the route to the airport: the passed by blinking over the night of São Paulo.

  They were tired and smiled. Cesar called them again and said the policeman had gone away.

  “Damn.... With this hangover I have, sleeping in jail would be a shit.

  Give me a cigarette too” she asked.

  “Do you remember the time we had to face this? I still have nightmares of that night, do you know? I think Pimenta is puking, I’ll check it out” Bia raised huffing.

  “I’ve got a headache” the other complained.

  Everything she wanted now was having a bottle of water in her hand. Thanks to this little party she had to drag her hangover for the rest of the night and probably for the coming morning. She closed her eyes and wondered why Cesar wasn’t there with her, observing the stars
. This led her to another thought: if they were in a serious relationship, why did he call Bia instead of calling her?

  CHAPTER 5

  Some days later...

  While she came back from the tattooing session a Tony Perry’s, she wondered about the nature of the vision she had had during the trip with that Israeli drug. At last, what exactly had happened then? Was it only a trip or was there anything else? Why couldn’t she take those moments off her head? And why did that seem to be so real? When the Uber car stopped in front of the building where she lived, the driver needed to call her to take her out of her divagations. She thanked and left to the warm wind of March. In the building’s sidewalk, Cesar was talking to Bia. She greeted them:

  “I’m worn-out, the work sucked.”

  “Didn’t you have any joints today?”, Cesar asked.

  “No, Tony wasn’t even there. It was only me and the gringa herself, but now it’s over. I’m going up to rest a little”.

  “There’s a galley up there, they needed somewhere to roll up the whole thing.”

  “Damn, Cesar, I’m fucking tired.”

  “Smoke a joint that you will relax” Bia laughed.

  The red-haired girl raised her finger of fuck you without courage and turned her back. Her newest obsession visited her again: she wanted to learn whether that experience at the rocker’s house had been only a hallucination generated by her subconscious mind or an experience in another dimension.

  She entered the smoky apartment and went to the center table, where an individual with all the hipsters’ clichés in his look was rolling up the material. There must have been some twelve people spread around in the living room, and she knew some two or three, by sight. The TV was on, showing a video of the music Dorme em Paz [Sleep in Peace], by Ludov. When she approached, the hipster she knew made sure she should not take one to light. But one of them made a sign and the hipster recoiled and greeted her with a nod of his head.

  She went to her room and when she came in, she found two guys kissing each other in her bed. They were two other unknown guys.

  “Get out!” she shouted.

  They both sat in the bed and remained looking at her, without understanding exactly what was happening.

  “It’s my room, dickheads!” she clarified.

  They both left the room rushing and crestfallen. She put her case of Felix the cat beside her table, kept the drug away in a drawer, closed and locked the door and opened the window. She took her notebook and sat in the bed. She stared the ceiling while the operating system was being fed, cursing Cesar mentally for having turned the apartment where they lived into an anarchic headquarter of the narcotic counterculture. It was good to have drugs for free sometimes and always have a party to go, but sometimes this was exhausting. Her day had been so tiresome, she was trying to recover the contents she had lost for absence in college, she had differential and integral calculation test; she failed for sure, and then she ran to Morumbi to attend Tony Perry’s lady of leisure.

  She typed in the search bar of the browser: Ego Break

  The first result regarded a ritual in tribute of Ganesha, the elephant god of Hinduism, in which the coconut break symbolizes the breaking of the ego. The wizard of the video informed that the ego break occurs when bad things happen in our lives, when our will is not satisfied. But what she searched was the approaching of the Chaos Magic. The other results were vaguer and vaguer, in which only loosened words brought insignificant results. She added definition in the search. Google showed a snippet:

  She then searched “Carrol9” and “Ego Break” and, after passing by some results that did not mean much of what she was looking for, she came to a passage of Liber Null of the so-called Peter J. Carrol:

  9Peter J. Carroll: Born in 1953, in England, Carrol was always interested in magic and occultism, but he decided to graduate in Sciences. When he was in college, he started to practice magic experiences regularly. As soon as he finished graduation, he traveled to India and Himalaya, where he went through inexplicable situations in the viewpoint of Science itself. From this combination of magic experiences and scientific knowledge, his sole research line arose, and he develops it until these days.

  In the seventies, Carrol and some of his colleagues, influenced by Shamanism and the works of authors, like Austin Osman Spare and Aleister Crowley, developed the structure of what came to be called Chaos Magic. Carrol became one of the cofounders of the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT), the magic order pioneering the research, development and disclosure of this trend.

  “Anathematization is a technique practiced directly on yourself. Eat all repugnant things until they don’t cause aversion anymore. Search for the union with everything that you normally reject. Plot against your most sacred principles in thoughts, words and action. At some moment, you will witness the loss or putrefaction of everything you love. Therefore, reflect on the transitory and contingent nature of all things. Examine everything that you believe in, all preferences and all the opinions, cut them out.

  The personality, a mask of convenience, is stuck on the face. The vision is stuck by the “ego”. The human spirit becomes a trivial mess of insignificant identifications. The dearest principles are the biggest lies. “I think, therefore I am”. But what is “I”? The more you think, the more the ‘ego’ gets closed. When we think “I’m sleeping”, our ego is blind. The intellect is a sword, and its use is to prevent identification with any especial phenomenon one might find. The most powerful minds are stuck to a minimum of fixed principles. The sole clear view is that of the top of a mountain of one’s dead egos[11]”.

  Those concepts meant a shock for her. What had been read about the theme in The Bible of Chaos were texts that showed the subject in a very generic and superficial manner, about changes of paradigms and things like this. She had never reflected about the nature of the personality, about the definition of the ego. If the human being is a product of the means in which he or she develops his or her history, how to identify what is part of our soul, this flame that burns inside and we call personality, and we call “ego”? Would it be possible to reach the root of the ego, lower the analysis to a level in which one could find the real “ego”, similarly, to what the physicists have done to analyze the most infinitesimal parts until they found the atom? Would it be possible to discover who would be this “ego” irrespectively of the psychosocial, economic, demographic influences? An independent core that would maintain its individuality whether it had been born in Brazil in a family with a few resources of the countryside of São Paulo or a family that is part of the nobleness of Dubai, or fishers in India, etc.

  She needed to know more, she searched about anathematization in www.thebibleofchaos.com. The correct expression should be this, therefore she had not found anything satisfactory before. She went through several results until she found a passage by Aleister Crowley[12], that drew her attention.

  “Most people in this world are ataxic12, they cannot coordinate their mental muscles to make a proposed motion. They have no real will, only a set of desires, many of which contradicting one another. The victim twists from a desire to another (and is no less vacillating because the motions may be occasionally much violent) and at the end of life, the motions are mutually cancelled. Nothing has been reached, except for something the victim is not aware of: the destruction of one’s own personality, the confirmation of indecision. This is a person torn by Choronzon13.

  12 Ataxic: From ataxia: a·ta·xi·a |cs| fem. noun.

  [Medical] Pathologic incoordination of the body motion (ex.: walking ataxia)

  [Medical] Dirorder of the psychologic phenomena.

  "ataxia", in Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa (online), 20082013, [https://www.priberam.pt/dlpo/ataxia] (accessed on 12-10-2017).

  13 Choronzon: Also known as ‘Coronzon’ or by number ‘333’, is a demon originated from the writings of the sixteenth century by the occultists Edward Kelley and John Dee in the Enochian magic system. In the twent
ieth century, he became an important element in the Thelemic system, founded by Aleister Crowley, where Choronzon is an inhabitant of the Abyss, and one believes he’s the last greatest obstacle in the way of the Insider. Thelemites believe that, in case he is found with the necessary preparation, his function will be that of ‘destroying’ the Ego, which allows the follower to move beyond the Abyss and arrive to the Pyramids City.

  Also known as the Dispersion Demon, Choronzon is described by

  Crowley as a temporary personification of the delirious and unconscious forces that occupy the Abyss. In this system, Choronzon receives his form in an evocation so that he is dominated.

  How come the will may be trained? All of these desires, whims, fantasies, inclinations, trends, appetites, must be detected, examined, judged by the pattern of help or impairment of the main objective, and treated accordingly.

  It’s obvious that control and courage are necessary. I was willing to add abnegation regarding the conventional discourse, but how could I name such abnegation that is merely denying those things that impair the ego? It’s not suicide killing the malaria germs in the blood of someone.[13]”

  Then, her level of understanding gained one more layer. The meaning of the text seemed quite clear, Crowley is clearly saying that the ego is a force that needs to be tamed and subdued by irons, otherwise, the individual will be manipulated by his or her desires and those of the others, whether by the arising of the environment, the place where he or she was born and their influences.

  Ah! Ok, but what does this have to do with me? She wondered, trying to deny that knowledge had touched her and wanting to know if at last that vision had not been a purely chemical trip, because she somehow felt she experienced a state of gnosis or some kind of spiritual experience.