Rick Moody - Demonology

Once I told my mother she was going to inherit a lot of money from an aunt in Lithuania. What did my mother know of Lithuania? She was raised in New Jersey and she had an Irish surname. Maybe I was trying to get attention, as guidance counselors had it then. Maybe I had an active imagination. Maybe I was trying to best my charming, handsome brother in the competition for her affections. Maybe it was because my dad had absconded at the first opportunity, back when I was in single digits. Of course, by virtue of my forecasting gift, I realized that my old man had another wife and family elsewhere, in Moline, Illinois, if you’re interested. I could see their shrubs and annuals, Siamese cats, sugary breakfast cereals, it just dawned on me. I had known this just as I knew that the 1974 Mets would win no more than eighty games. Some days in my room, when I had exhausted a stack of pulps and The 4:30 Movie was a romantic comedy not to my tastes, well, I felt I could contact my father, through extrasensory perceptions. Dad, I would say, this is your son Everett calling, would you be willing to accept charges? You have, by my estimation, now missed seven of my birthdays, and I feel, if you’re worrying about it, that you could just go ahead and roll some of those birthday moneys into an, umm, interest-bearing account toward my education at CCNY, which will probably start in about sixteen months. I’d be happy to acknowledge receipt of a cashier’s check or a money order. If you want to know my personal feelings about the fact that you have missed seven of my birthdays, I guess I would say that it’s a little irresponsible,and I wonder if this had to happen to you, if your dad had to blow your childhood environment to smithereens in order to make you the kind of person who could take a seven-year business trip and forget to write. That’s about all I’ve got today, feel free to contact me at your earliest convenience.

My mom never had an aunt from Lithuania or any relatives anywhere besides old Hibernia, and they were mostly dead, and truth is if I lied to her about the inheritance she was going to receive it’s probably because I worried about my mother. When she got home each night from the long-term convalescent home where she was an accountant, she was about as lively as a vinyl footstool. And she had to officiate in the fisticuffs between myself and my brother. Iwanted her to have something to look forward to. She played the lottery, when the lottery became state supported, and I used to see her at the variety store. She’d be counting out the grimy singles that she kept in a drawer in the kitchen. She scrawled out numbers based on sentimental remembrances. Occasionally she took home small purses. The point here is that my prophecy is kind of inexact, and you have to use a sort of metaphoric-analytic schema (it’s in the retail-sales training manual here on my desk) in order to understand exactly how it works its wonders.

A few contemporary forecasts. Cher will contract a grave immune disorder of unknown origins, until she reveals the nature of the voodoo that has so preserved her semblance. I was just making this point to Mrs. Rona Peregrina of Bensonhurst, in fact, while issuing a strong sell recommendation in the e-merchandizing sector. The color yellow will become the one color that everyone has to be seen in. In the Big Apple, Gotham City, below Fourteenth Street, everyone will start to wear it: canary, lemon, mustard, maize, curry, goldenrod, marigold, sunflower, ochre. Entire discotheques, places I’d never go, yellow, inside and out, the yellow of the power tie, the caution signal, the yellow of foul-weather gear, the yellow of hepatitis. What else? Books, apparently useless objects of my childhood, paperweights, shelf decorators, books will get rare. You know that volume of women’s sexual fantasies that you’re embarrassed about, or that science-fiction opus about computer telepathy among Venusians? You’ll throw these out, or give them to the library, and you will never replace these books. Your kids will read screens; their contact lenses will fuse onto their eyes. And the wild language that you used to find in books or upon stones, language of prophecy, like when a guy from Schroon Lake, New York, or Cowan, Tennessee, calls out from his wilderness about how to interpret obscure texts rescued from caves of Egypt, texts that refer to our last end, this language will instead be used to write irate letters to owners of television stations who sell zirconium rings to minimum-wage earners across the land. These letters will never be read on air, if indeed, they are ever read at all. More? Every relationship you ever have, in your entire life, will end in disease. Sound far-fetched? It’s not. Today you eat grilled cheese on seven-grain bread, tomorrow you clutch your gut, locate the tumor. A dog will be crossed with a sheep, because it will make wool less expensive. Most people will accept this rationale. Melvin Cushman, chief executive of that very hot venture capital firm, Vortex Solutions, will, utilizing techniques perfected by American-educated doctors in Lagos, Nigeria, have himself cloned as a gift for his wife, Wilhelmina, thirty years his junior. Ijust love the littlelady here, and I’m not about to let her go just because my pancreas is giving out.

My brother’s kid, the one with leukemia, will get sicker still.

Here’s another story. I met my wife on the subway. I was on my way to a basketball game when Bobby Erlich, the paraplegic, came wheeling into the subway car, displaying his amputated limbs. OK, not really. I would often hear the door at the end of the car open, however, and I would think, Here comes Erlich. Any desperate life form that entered the space, Evening, ladies and gentlemen, sorry to interrupt and I don’t mean no one no harm but I am homeless and trying to get money for my three kids. I’m currently living here on the trains with my family. Any unfortunate was the harbinger of a celestial accounting for yours truly, Let there now be penitence. Know what I mean? That night even worse things came to pass. I had changed for the Seventh Avenue line at Times Square, and by habit I waited near the rear of the train, the empty car; if you’re ever going to know that this visible earth is only a splinter of the mystical action spinning out around you, figure on the last car. I was sitting down on the empty bench at the front end of the last car, with a book, probably something required for a class at Queens College, let’s say Plato’s Apologia, And now, O men who have condemned me, I would fain prophesy to you; for I am about to die, and in the hour of death men are gifted with prophetic power. Besides, nobody on earth messes with you if you’ve reading the classics. Just as I had arranged myself on this bench, and opened my book, I heard this guy coming down the stairs, making a real commotion, Hold the train! Hold the train! Ladies swept aside by his assault. You know those stairs at the end of the platform there? How many femurs have become bone meal on that staircase? How many hips replaced?

Hold the train. I could make out his latecomer’s face, as the doors tintinnabulated and converged. He was smiling. This was the train he needed to catch. This was his quarry. Never mind hindrances that developed, the door being closed, the conductor shuttering his window, the train beginning to move, Hold the train. I wish he’d said something more compelling, such as Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, turneth it upside down, scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.

I looked up from the Apologia, saw him smiling. I knew right away. I didn’t want to know. But, like I’ve been trying to tell you, my heart was crenelated with scars of foreknowledge. He was making for that spot where the plates of the two cars abutted. A bisection of chains to keep away the foolhardy. The train lurched forward, I saw the smiler disappear out of the region of my peripheral vision, like a bird of air lifting off. He wore a smile, he grabbed for the chain, got one leg up, his shopping bag went under, there was a silence, there was exertion, he fumbled for the bag slipping down between the cars, there was a span of blackness, there was the third rail, and then he was tumbling after his possessions, down there. Between platform and train. Holy God. The Apologia fell out of my hands. When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them. Just as I saw him lifting off, as in falconry, out of the margin of my weak eyes, I was up off the bench, the train jumped, and there was that awful hydraulic exhalation that means this conveyance is not going to move for a while, this train has met impediment upon the tracks. The entire system of trains, all the hundreds of miles of it, all Gotham knew at once what it had done; its daily imaginings again included gristle, sinew, marrow, plasma. There had been an incident.