The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist's Solution

by Lisa de Nikolits

  “And go where?” I asked. “I wasn’t aware you wanted to go anywhere else. You could have said.”

  “I was waiting for you to say,” he countered. “But then you didn’t and now I know why.”

  “Moving on,” Rick was firm. “Come on, Adam. Give your mother a break.”

  I expected Adam to look sulky, but he smiled at Rick. “I’m being a needy, whiny kid, aren’t I?”

  “A bit, but I love you anyway,” I heard Rick say as he led Adam away.

  “I love that boy,” I told Tim.

  “Adam?”

  “No. Rick.” We both laughed. “And Adam,” I added.

  Tim looked at his phone. “Janet is sorry. He’s running a bit late.”

  “No hurry. I’m happy to sit here for a moment and do nothing.”

  “True Love?” Tim asked, and my eyes welled up with tears.

  “Too late,” I replied.

  He patted my shoulder. “I’ll get you a latte. Can’t cure a sad heart, but I can warm your belly.”

  “I love you too,” I shouted after him, and I heard him laugh.

  Janet arrived, flustered. “I hate being late,” he said, and I told him it was quite okay. Tim reassured him by telling him how Adam had questioned me and we got a good laugh out of it.

  “He’d have a good career as an interrogator,” Tim said, while Janet got the cards ready. I slid off the sofa and we both sat on the floor. Janet noticed my look of apprehension.

  “Relax,” Janet said. “It will be fine. Remember, the cards are just guides to help your soul find clarity. They’re not telling you what your future will be. I like your tat by the way.”

  I thanked him and started picking out the cards. I felt so responsible for my own future and then I realized that unless I could do this without worry and fear, I shouldn’t do it at all.

  “Wait, I feel like I contaminated my selection,” I said. “Please, can I do it again?”

  Janet obligingly reshuffled the deck.

  He looked up at me. “This, my darling, is a spectacularly good reading.”

  “But how can it be good,” I asked, and tears rolled down my cheeks and my chest started heaving, “when I am going to lose Jason?” Both he and Tim knew the whole story.

  “Margaux, the man was dying before you met him,” Tim said. “Your meeting him—and Lyndon’s meeting him—was a gift to both of you. I know it’s hard, but you can be grateful for that. You’ll have true love for the rest of your life, albeit on your foot.” He casts a meaningful glance at Janet. “Look at this young buck. I adore him, but soon he will realize he should be with another young buck and not with a wrinkled old dick like me.”

  “Not true!” Janet protested and jumped to his feet. “I love your wrinkled old dick.”

  “Settle down, young buck,” I told Janet. “Let’s get these cards read. Hmm. Homecoming. Does that mean I will reconcile with Lyndon?”

  “Were you ever unreconciled?” Tim asked.

  “Well, let’s see. He ditched me at a ferry stop and disappeared into the night. Since then, the only communication I have had from him is one email that was actually from Jason.”

  “Classic mid-life crisis,” Tim said. “And look at the opportunities it afforded you. You met us, were possessed by a demon, had a surprise visit from your son, banished the demon, fell in love, got a tattoo, and soon, you will be part of a revolutionary protest hosted by a bunch of anarchists who are flying in from all around the world. Quite the adventure, if you ask me. None of which would have happened if you and Lyndon had wandered obliviously around the world, with him in denial and you filling your purse with meaningless souvenirs and trinkets.”

  “I wouldn’t call them meaningless,” I protested. “But I get what you are saying. But how does one do that? Genuinely appreciate the good and not focus on the bad?”

  “You keep working at it,” Tim said. “Persistence wins the day.”

  “Not sure I agree, but I’ll try. For example, young buck here…”

  “Please stop calling me that!”

  “Okay. Dammit Janet said I have a good deck of cards. Let’s focus on that.”

  Janet looked pleased. “Moving on,” he said. “The Four of Wands. Here is the message I’m hearing: I surround myself with the love and support of those around me, knowing that whatever I call home is a source of stability.”

  “I wish I was taking notes,” I said, worried.

  “Your soul will remember what messages you need to take with you,” Janet said, and he closed his eyes. “Ten of Wands: Only you can decide when you have overcommitted. You must honour your strengths and know when it is time to lighten your load. Ten of Cups: You are ready to live in a way that is fully aligned with your heart’s intentions. Three of Cups: Your relationships are a source of abundance. The more you put into them, the more you get back. The Knight of Wands: You trust in the energy available to you now and you move towards your goals with unwavering confidence. Ten of Pentacles: You are getting clearer on what you value most in your life. You work hard and trust that your efforts are paying off. And, The Chariot: You are called upon to create your own path and you will gain confidence in each step you take.” He stopped and opened his eyes.

  I groaned.

  “What’s wrong now?” Tim wanted to know. He was looking at his phone.

  “I won’t remember any of that. And I want to, it was so beautiful. Janet, how do you do that?”

  He shrugged. “I just do.”

  “I recorded him and sent it to your phone,” Tim told me. “Check your inbox and stop fretting.”

  I was as delighted as a kid at Christmas. “Thank you, Tim.” I got up and gave him a hug.

  “Are you coming to Dames tonight?” he asked.

  “Of course.” I sighed. “But I do feel like all I’m doing is waiting for the day after tomorrow.”

  40. LYNDON

  GAME DAY ARRIVED. May 10th: Sid Vicious’s birthday. Long live Sid. We were in Wollongong with half of the U-Hauls, while the others, with the porta potties, bottled water, and snacks van were on the other side of the city in Frenchs Forest.

  It was three-thirty a.m., and we were all ready. It was time to start rolling slowly towards the city, moving in the darkness. Everyone was jumpy, no one knew what to expect. None of us wanted to fall flat on our faces. We wanted this go off the way we’d planned: the T-shirts, the silence, the toilet paper. We’d even practiced unfurling toilet rolls off the roof of Jason’s building, and some had worked better than others.

  After our sessions, Jason had issued instructions on how to unfurl the perfect bog roll. “In order to unfurl the roll neatly, you start by making sure that the first sheet is free and loose. Then, with the roll on top, facing away from you, and the sheet at the bottom, curving towards you, you throw the roll away from you. Imagine it’s a streamer at a kid’s party. The unfurling does not have the same effect if the sheet is on top and the roll faces you. The roll must face away from you for a smooth and fluid movement. Then it flies out like the kid’s party streamer. You wouldn’t unfurl a streamer towards yourself, right? It’s the same with the toilet roll. Practise with one at home.”

  We had also driven a few hours north and rehearsed the megaphone siren call, measuring the distance that the sound carried on both still and windy days. We had tried to think of everything. By five a.m. the trucks were in position, and the bridge was full of cars. People were moving silently about. The porta-potties were in place, the vans were open for business, and people were gliding around, finding a place to settle.

  Jason had two other signs made: “PEACEFUL PROTEST IN PROGRESS UNTIL 7.30 A.M.” and “WE WILL NOT MOVE UNTIL 7:30 A.M. SILENT PROTEST IN ACTION.” Both of these were fixed at each end of the bridge.

  He had a stack of printouts with this message, along with an explanation of what we were doing and
when the protest would end. As soon as traffic enforcement got word that cars were stopped on the bridge, they arrived en masse. Jason and a bunch of volunteers handed out the explanation leaflets, but the officers were confused and upset and shouted at us to leave. They flicked on the blue-and-red flashing lights and both ends of the bridge lit up like a carnival. The sounds of the officers’ anger carried across the bridge from the north and south sides.

  This, in turn, attracted a crowd down at the Rocks and over at Kirribilli and before long, the slopes to the North Shore were filled to the maximum with spectators, despite the earliness of the hour. Sean told me afterwards that more people watched than the number who came out for the New Year’s Eve bridge fireworks. So the crowd was over a million.

  Mark had opened the gates to the bridge climb, and people scampered up the arch. It looked fairly easy and I wondered if I could have given it a go, but my place was next to Jason.

  The police were next to arrive, adding to the noise and mayhem. There were dogs barking at full volume, just as Jason had anticipated. The ABC News helicopter arrived, accompanied by three other helicopters, and I was glad Jason had insisted we all remain silent and contained or it would have been overwhelming.

  But, to my horror, in spite of my being Jason’s second-in-command, and despite of all the preparations and safety measures, I couldn’t do my part. I was hit by a panic attack. I was having a complete meltdown. My heart ricocheted like a boxer’s speed bag on overdrive, and I couldn’t breathe. The world was spinning and I was dizzy. Everything was warped, and my vision came and went like a melting mirage. I was going to let Jason down. I was one of his right-hand men, and I was going to fail him. But it wasn’t my fault. He had asked too much of me. I knew what he had planned, and I couldn’t face what was going to happen. He had persuaded me that it was what had to happen, but I couldn’t face it in reality.

  Sweat poured down my scalp, drenching my back and my belly. I closed my eyes, and was about to humiliate myself by falling to the ground and weeping like a baby. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder, a reassuring hand on my soaking wet shoulder. I opened my eyes and there was the frizzy-haired lady, the one who couldn’t afford toilet paper, and she was rubbing my back and pointing from my eyes to hers, that I was to look at her and then she mimed breathing, motioning her hand from her belly to her mouth. She pulled something out of her pocket—ear plugs! I jammed them into my ears, and the world immediately slowed down as the picture righted itself. Thank God. The camera lens of my mind found its focus. She handed me a bottle of water, which I glugged half of in one go. And then, I was back to being me.

  I mimed, “thank you, thank you,” with a Buddhist bow, my hands in prayer. She had saved me. She nodded and grinned, flashing her splayed yellow teeth and then disappeared into the crowd.

  I finished the water, crushed the bottle, and put it into my backpack. I had been saved by ear plugs and the frizzy-haired lady, about whom I had harboured only the most ungracious of thoughts.

  I looked at my watch. It was 6:25. I was late. I pushed my way to the centre of the bridge, reminding myself that I wasn’t allowed to run. I arrived seconds before the scheduled start. Jason gave me a filthy look, as if to say, “Where have you been?” He had no idea how relieved I was that I’d made it at all.

  At 6:36, Jason sounded the siren, and the big banner unfurled.

  It did not catch and it did not fumble, it rolled out in a perfectly fluid motion. I know, because I watched it later on television. It was perfect. And the sign could be read from miles away—STOP SHITTING ON OUR WORLD, with an anarchy sign on each end.

  We let that message soak in for a while. I looked around. At least eight thousand people had swarmed the bridge like a river of black ants, and some of them had climbed to places I hadn’t even imagined possible.

  Sirens flashed and helicopters whirred and ducked. I looked at the crowds below and on the shoreline. The Opera House pavilion was packed, as were The Rocks, Central Quay, and Kirribilli. As far as the eye could see, people had gathered in their thousands to watch the protest, our protest. Boats and yachts filled the harbour, and the ferries had stopped running because they couldn’t squeeze through the unruly waterway. I couldn’t help but smile at how annoyed the Australian authorities must be at this disruption. But we’d given them a timeline, we were doing no harm. They simply had to wait it out.

  And I could tell that every single one of us on the bridge was affected by the power of what we had achieved. We were singular in our actions; we were indeed the zen warrior army that Jason envisaged. I pulled out my ear plugs and a solid wave of noise crashed into me, but I wasn’t pulled into its undertow. Instead, I rode the crest of frenzied sound.

  At seven a.m., Jason sounded the next siren, and we were ready. We unfurled the rolls of toilet paper from the top of the arch and the railing, and they fell like a solid white curtain.

  While all of this was going on, Jason, miked up and recording, narrated to the live feed on YouTube and ABC News.

  We had scheduled thousands of tweets to go out, with a link to the video. From their phones on the bridge, while they waited for the second siren to sound, the army posted updates on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. They fired off emails, text messages, and anything else they could think of to spread the word. Jason had written a script linked to a hashtag, and as long as the hashtag was used, the posts would be deleted after the protest so the cops couldn’t trace them.

  At the exact moment that the curtain dropped, the police fell eerily silent and even the dogs stopped barking. Afterwards, I realized it was simply coincidental, a command must have been issued for them to quieten down and wait for the protest to be over. But it worked to our benefit because it made the whole thing so much more dramatic.

  And then something happened. A groundswell that started slowly. We weren’t sure what we were hearing at first, but the crowd started clapping. They clapped and cheered, and the noise grew to the point that I was worried we wouldn’t hear the third siren call at 7:15. But we did hear it, and, once again in a single motion, we released the toilet paper. The long white strands fluttered and flew. Some floated down, while others were caught in a breeze and drifted away into the blue sky. Our curtain was a cloud that slowly dissipated. Some of the toilet paper fell onto the boats below, and I saw people eagerly scrambling and grabbing it, souvenirs of what they had just witnessed.

  And none of us moved.

  At 7:20, Jason made his speech. “Have you forgotten how to think?” Jason began. “I had. Most of us have. We have politicians, teachers, religious leaders, parents, television programs, video games, and enough computer equipment to send us to the moon and back, and all of it is designed to stop us from thinking. I want you to take a moment to think about the fact that you live on a planet. A real planet. Not a virtual planet but a real planet. And we are killing it every single day because we don’t know how to think for ourselves anymore. We fill the world with rubbish. Do you need all the things you buy and throw away? Can’t we learn to share? Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Who on earth shares anything? We want everything to be mine, mine, mine. But I believe we can learn to share. Countries can learn to share. Children and adults can learn to share. We can share jobs, homes, resources, and ideas. We can create communities. We can create financial security because we can look after each other. We look after our own families, we believe in our own countries, so why can’t we believe in a global world in the same way? I believe we can learn to find joy in shared societal values that respect human life. Our move to a mechanized future will take us further away from the earth herself and will ultimately lead to our demise.

  “We have lost all sense of who we humans are, what we are, and we don’t even know what the word ‘human’ means. We have lost all sense of value. I beg this of you. Think. Think for yourself. See that a robotic existence is not the future for human beings. Be Your Revolution! Steal
back your reality. Steal back your life and the world as you would like it to be. If each person tries to live their life with integrity, the world will heal. Steal back moments of being a true human being on planet Earth, not a zombie attached to a device. Take back your world from the thieving corporations, from greed, from the lust of materialism. Be Your Revolution. Steal Back Your World.” He paused for a moment.

  “I need you to remember this message. And I am willing to take extreme action, to make you all remember this day and this message. You cannot afford to forget.”

  At 7:26, Jason raised a gun to his temple and shot himself.

  He crumpled to the ground. I dropped to his side and cradled him. His aim had been true. The bullet had entered his head cleanly; there was no exit wound. A small pool of blood gathered under his head as his heart continued to pump. When he died, a few seconds later, I closed his eyelids and stroked his head.

  I wanted to talk to him, to tell him that he had done it, that he had achieved everything he had set out to do, but I wanted to honour what he had wanted, so I stayed silent and stroked his head.

  The crowds around the harbour screamed when they realized what had happened; we heard them clearly over the helicopters.

  Sean sounded the final siren, and the army descended from the arches. It turned out that we hadn’t accurately calculated the dismantling. It was 8:30 by the time the last anarchist left the bridge. The cars and trucks took longer to leave than we had thought they would. The ground was lined with thousands of T-shirts, the only litter we’d leave. Jason had urged people not to be tempted to take their T-shirts as souvenirs. He had said it was too risky and that if they were caught with them, they’d be arrested. He had asked people to lay the T-shirts down flat to line the road and the pedestrian sidewalks. This blanket would be our final message. It was our way of saying that we would tar the road with our intentions and that even if we were trampled on, we would remain strong.