Tim Pratt - Sympathy for the Devil

I didn’t get very good reception in the basement, but I had nothing else to do but try, and leaf through some of the books: Liber Ala, 777, but I wasn’t in the right state of mind for them. My reception was as poor of that of the television. I played with the UHF knob for a bit and found, I thought, the station that played the Polish-language programming grandma liked, but it didn’t come through clearly. With a bit of pressure I managed to balance the knob between two stations and got two signals at once, both indistinct and distant under the wall of frizzling static. I sat on the floor, back to the edge of my futon and watched, and then it came to me.

There are two universes. The one we all live in, the one you’re familiar with. Ever stub your toe or have an orgasm or eat a sandwich or have sand in the crack of your ass after a day at the beach or an afternoon in your garden? That’s the universe of Choronzon, the dweller in the Abyss, the dark being who stands between us and our perfect, enlightened selves. Choronzon is not really a being, he is our being, all our flaws and hidden shames, the swirling chaos that we keep down deep in ourselves, and the moments of avoidance and denial we manage to come up with to keep it at bay.

The second universe, that’s the good stuff.

Alick in London, on the wrong side of history. Mussolini had deported him as if the Sicilian countryside wasn’t already full of goatfuckers. Leah’s womb betrayed him, with a girl that died and a miscarriage. The womb of God, the holy grail, was filled with tainted blood. Alick’s bankrupt too, having lost a libel case against bohemian writer Nina Hamnett, who dared call him a “black magician.”

The Germans went crazy again, reveling in the secrets of the Black Lodge, in the evil reflection of Logos known as Da’ath to the Hebrews. The Hebrews being broiled and gassed by Hitler. Rudolph Hess lands in Scotland and a peasant with a pitchfork captures him with ease. Ian Fleming has an idea: send Alick to interview the superstitious Hess. The Nazis were steeped in the occult, and even based some of their troop movements on astrology. Fleming’s superiors nix the plan, but Alick knows Hess. He can sense the German across the moors and miles, twitching and counting on his fingers, dictating plaintive letters to phantom secretaries in his cell, crying for his friend, Hitler.

Alick isn’t the wickedest man in the world anymore; he doesn’t even rank in the top twenty.

Okay, so now I am going to enlighten you all. Liber XV O.T.O. Ecclesiae Gnosticae Catholicae Canon Missae describes the Gnostic mass. Here’s the big secret: in the same way a Catholic or Eastern Orthodox practitioner takes communion and thus eats the body of Christ, the Logos made flesh, the worshippers of the Gnostic mass eat Da’ath. By the way, just knowing this makes you an initiate of the Ninth Degree, so enjoy it and welcome to the club.

Alick in Hastings, nineteen forty-seven. It’s cold. Alick is fat now, and needn’t shave his head to keep up his mien of bald menace. Menace, like a bone-white old man who spends fifteen hours a day in bed is a menace. His Will is gone; he can’t even rouse his own member anymore, much less the members of any of the innumerable little sects and cults that have kept up the chants and the publications of this or that inane ritual. Really, Alick was just pulling it all out of his bum half the time. The other half, well, most of that was just for the opium and the cock, and, rarely, a cunt. And the tiny fraction left over? Well, Alick decides, some of that was almost real.

There’s a presence, closer now than it has ever been. No longer is it the Holy Guardian Angel, or a young boy heavy with promises weighing on Alick’s back. It’s in his chest. His lungs are drowning in mucus and scum. Alick wishes the loo would expire, so that a plumber would be called. Alick would summon him into the room like a minor goetic spirit, and demand that the worker take his snake and jam it down Alick’s throat, and pull out the aeons of black muck he’s sure are living in his chest. Regrets? Alick has a few.

“Sometimes, I hate myself,” he says, then he dies, closed like a window.

My name is Ron Jankowaik, and I am thirty-two years old. I work as an underwriter for Jefferson Insurance Partners Ltd. in Danbury, Connecticut. In the last election, I voted for Joseph Lieberman even though he left the Democratic Party. I liked his guts for standing up for what he believes in, even if I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says. I felt that the other guy was too much of a loose canon. I also believe that marriage is something between a man and a woman.

I’m married to Marie Jankowaik. She likes to joke that she knew it was love when she would no longer cringe at the idea of having the last name Jankowaik. We met when I was tending bar in New Haven. She went to U. Conn and I had drifted up there from Pennsylvania, poking around in cheap apartments and reading a lot, mostly, and we hooked up right away. Been seven years and still going strong. Once we qualify for a mortgage, and if we can find a place for less than a quarter mil around here, we’re definitely going to start a family.

Marie likes it from behind, which is fine with me as she is a bit on the hippy side. She’s quiet, grunts and whimpers, never screams or moans. When we’re together like that I often find my mind wandering. Her wide back is like a blank canvas, or a movie screen the second before the lights go down. And just under the skin, Da’ath, the abyss. And beyond that seeming infinity The Tree of Life, the Sephirot, pulses. With every thrust, electricity shoots up the spine and across her nervous system.

Look, people, I know what you’re thinking. You’re expecting this story to end with some tedious murder. I slide my forearm down and around Marie’s neck, and then at the moment of orgasm I jerk, and yank, separating her skull from her vertebrae like my grandmother used to do with goats when she was a kid. No. Here’s how the story ends.

I feel a presence over my shoulder and to the left, when I bend over my desk at work in my little cube, or when I’m idling in my car at a red light that’s taking its sweet time changing to green, or when I’m fucking my wife with nothing but the creak of bedsprings and the hum of our well-wired ranch house encaging us.

Sometimes I turn around and it’s a co-worker. Marc, eager to buttonhole me in the break room and tell me about the college Spring Break when he went to Boystown and took in the donkey show. Two guys have to work together to tie the donkey’s front legs, and lift him up so that one of the strippers can blow him, then she straddles and fucks. Crowley was deported and derided for years in the press, chased from his home and nearly burnt out of the boarding houses he was reduced to living in. Marc tells his story for laughs, and bonded well enough with the regional manager over it that now he’s my supervisor.

Sometimes I turn around and it’s a woman in the car behind me, hunched over the wheel, her face a twist of aggravation, one hand clenched like talons, the other reaching over and smacking the kid in the car seat next to her. A white woman, middle class, the nice part of Danbury. (Yes, you were wondering what color she was.) Crowley cried when his first baby girl died, and when the other was born dead. This woman just wants the shrieking to stop.

And at night, when I have Marie bent over the corner of the bed, and I let my mind wander, I feel that presence back and to the left, and I see myself. A better me, fucking a better Marie, atop a better bedspread in a better universe. Through the abyss I’ll crawl one day and leave all the detritus of this world behind. I’ll walk into and through the wall of white static and into that better reality. We have to live through this world of horrors, eat all it offers, and then we can transcend.