Love Is the Law (16 page)

“Yeah, I am,” Dad said. “Now don’t fucking interrupt me again.” He looked to Aram. “Take him!” Aram actually did lurch over and grab Mike by the collar, but there was really nowhere to go in the overcrowded basement, so they both just stood there, looking stupid. I glanced back at Karen. She had a hand on her chest, and was rubbing.

Dad’s valedictory didn’t make much sense. He was a magus. I was a sacrifice. My blood would swirl down the drains built into the basement floor and feed the Great Thing on which Long Island was built. The capitalist system was working too well—the commies were running, collapsing like a house of cards and falling like dominoes, and wilting under the fires of superior productivity, and dissolving like rock in the pipe, and other clichés, and that was not fair. Not fair to anyone who had been told that their services were no longer required at Grumman, Sperry, Fairchild, all the defense contractors with local offices.
A peace dividend
, Dad snarled rhetorically, would just lead to
division
into
pieces
, and poverty for the assembled.

My father always had an air of rat-like charisma about him, and times were tough on Long Island. He could have sold insurance to teenagers with freshly minted drivers’ licenses, or prime Florida swampland to seniors eager to follow the advice on the banners some guy had hung on overpasses:
get out of new york state, before it’s too late
!
Dad could have done a lot of things, but instead he did all this. A little cult of thirty desperate people or so. That’s magick, and politics, these days.

“We’ll all live like niggers!” he shouted. “You want that?” Dad demanded of one guy in particular, who was too surprised to answer. So Dad turned and shoved his index finger into someone else’s chest. “Do you?” That guy just shook his head no, slowly and gravely.

“Because that’s what I’ve been doing. On purpose! Living like a nigger. On Long Island, where there aren’t supposed to be any goddamned niggers, I smoked crack! I sucked dick for five bucks a pop just to get another rock! I would have fucked my own daughter, just like those dirty niggers do!” He gestured at Chelsea with that revelation. She was stoic, smirking even. “I had to crawl down into the muck and horror of it all, to bring back the fire of wisdom, to understand what is to be done!” I could almost hear the capitals:
What Is To Be Done
, like Lenin’s famous pamphlet.

“I’ll kill my only begotten daughter, a commie and a whore. It’ll all come back,” Dad said. “Something else will rise in the East,
orientis
! And America will come crawling back to us,” he said, his arms wide. “For her defense. Lady Liberty, on her knees like a whore, eyes wide and mouth open. She shall never raise her head from our laps again.”

I looked over at Mike. He cringed and mouthed four words:
There is no alternative
. Packed with occult significance, that phrase was. Margaret Thatcher’s line—
there is no alternative
to neoliberal global capitalism.
TINA
. Death to Communism, death to even social democracy and the welfare state. Death to society; there’s no such thing as society anyway. Mike looked terrified. What would the yang of capitalism be without the yin of Communism to keep it in check, and to keep Mike’s identity as a revolutionary intact and unchanging? There was no alternative to capitalism; we both knew that now, and for Mike there was no alternative save to throw in with Dad, against Bernstein, and join this fascist schism from the Invisible Party, and keep the red flag waving. No wonder he had wanted to keep an eye on me after coming to bail me out of prison. Hell, no wonder he had actually bothered bailing me out. Even Aram and Karen were slaves to the state. Without the threat of Communism, and the allure of radical chic, the state universities would have their budgets slashed, and ultimately they’d be privatized. There is no alternative . . .
to having to go out and get a real job.
Good luck, English majors
.

I was suddenly very happy that Mike was standing next to my father, and next to Chelsea. I wondered if Chelsea’s real name wasn’t “Tina.” These things have a tendency to harmonize.

But here’s what Dad misunderstood. Everything was harmonizing around me, not him. I was the synthesis of Bernstein’s thesis and his antithesis. He was summoning up that which he could not put down. This motley crew of accountants and academics and hausfraus would never be the revolutionary class—they would never be Leviathan. A cabal of idiot imps begging a greater God to intervene on their collective behalf? These fuckers should have just gone to church or something. Leviathan had been calling to me, filling me up, since Bernstein’s death. Bernstein was the sacrifice for the summoning, and Leviathan was bound to me. There are no coincidences. Leviathan had brought these people here, on deep currents of magick and geopolitics, before me. I was on the podium; they stood low before me. I was the executioner; they were to fill the drains with their blood and fat, on which Leviathan would sup. Even the choice of a basement made it easier for me, for the beast under my feet. It was cold outside, but so hot where I was standing. Oh, that furnace.

I began
dharana
. The Tower.
Break down the fortress of thine individual self, that thy truth may spring free from the ruins. Quarrel, combat, danger, ruin, destruction of plans, sudden death, escape from prison
—his interpretation from
The Book of Thoth
. Crowley’s Tower is not just struck down by lightning; it is consumed from below by the great maw of Dis.
All that is solid melts into air
. Dad’s voice was a buzz, of no concern to me. It only took an instant for enlightenment to strike. The waters of the deep boiled under me, in me, over me.

Dad made a few more flourishes, then Chelsea flicked open a straight razor and handed it to him with a smile on her face. The rest of the crowd was serious.

“Wait, don’t!” I said, holding out my hands. “No, please!”

I showed everyone my palms.

“Why didn’t you chain up her arms!” Mike cried. “Christ, did you
lose
them?”

Nothing up my sleeves.

“Doesn’t matter,” Dad said. He stepped up onto the stage to stand right before me.

And now, the levitation trick.

I tensed my neck and jaw, and lifted my legs, tucking my knees under my breasts. It was hard. My throat clamped shut. Eyes bulged open. Hung in the air. Feet twitching. Dad threw out an arm to draw the razor. In the left. That
sinister
hand. Then Leviathan. It called to me, and I was pulled down to the earth.

Abrahadabra!

And the three copper pipes, thin hot-water pipes, on which I had been hanging, came with me. The solder on the seams gave way. Cheap suburban Long Island ticky-tacky shit. Dad ate a faceful of steam and scalding water. His nose disintegrated before he even started screaming, and his eyes were smashed to jelly in their sockets. Mike almost dodged, but one of the boiling streams pulled his cheeks from his skull and filled his mouth, and cooked his lungs.

And Chelsea, sweet little Chelsea who looked like a skinny version of me, whose lithe body—Daddy’s favorite thing—wouldn’t have sundered the pipes had she been the one hanging, had she lifted her feet—she went slow. She got a faceful of Job 14:20—
Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron
—but lived long enough to claw at her face and scream and spit teeth before running right into Dad’s flailing arms, into the razor meant for me. The air was all steam and misty blood.

It all took less than a second. The crowd burst toward the doors, howling and throwing their limbs over their faces.

Aram made a mad dash for the razor. “No!” he shouted at the heart of the world. His Will rose up like a mountain pushed high with magma, and he would have slit me from throat to cunt, I know it, but for Roderick. He had one of the fishing oars from the wall and cracked it on the back of Aram’s neck. Aram fell in front of me, and I looked up and smiled.

Greg was there too, with an oar of his own. “Uh, we should go!” he croaked out. “Heavy fucking shit!” I coughed in response and waved them away. Roderick held out a hand but I mouthed the word
Go!
And they did, cleaving a path through the last knot of evacuees. Greg nailed Joshua with a pretty heavy shot on his way out, and Joshua went down even harder, head first on the cement steps of the cellar.
One more thing for me to step over
, I thought.

I found a few valves on the pipes leading back to the furnace and turned them till the water stopped. I took a few deep breaths. It wouldn’t matter if someone called the cops, or if they came. There was no place I could be locked up where my Will would not be free, where Leviathan would not be coiling and churning right under my feet.

But then, I realized that among the corpses of my enemies, one was missing. Riley. I palmed my keys and headed out to the Rabbit.

Marx has a great line. It’s so great, in fact, that it is often misquoted and misused. It goes like this:
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Usually, people think it’s just about history repeating itself, and not historical figures bubbling up out of the dynamic of the world to make a fool of themselves a generation or three after appearing so terrible. And there was Riley, appearing for the second time, in his magickal vestments, jimmying open my car’s hatch.

“Hello,” I said. My voice was fried. I felt like my throat had been balled up and left at the bottom of a laundry hamper, then quickly and incompletely ironed three months later.

“Hi,” he said, with a wave and a nod. He had a leather portfolio case with him. The hatch finally opened and he removed the painting.

“That’s mine.”

“No ma’am,” he said, smiling. “It’s mine. I won it from a rival, long ago. Then lent it out, and it was never returned to me.”

“I just killed three people, and I need some milk or something to soothe my throat. So put the painting down.”

He did, but in a way that told me that he was planning on picking it right back up after our conversation was concluded, and bringing it to his Mercedes, which was parked just a few yards away.

“Oh, you’re a killer, eh? Anyone I know?”

“I’m sure. My father.”

“And he is . . . ?”

“Seliger,” I said. “Also, Mike Schmidt.”

“Ah yes, the Communist,” Riley said, solemnly. “The other Communist, I suppose I should say.”

“They were trying to kill me.”

Riley unzipped his portfolio, turned it upside down, and shook out some imaginary dust. Then he smoothed over his robes, and gathered up the fabric to examine the hem. “No agent of the state can perceive me while I wear this,” he murmured, mostly to himself.

“Have you tested it?” I asked.

“I’ve read the specs,” he said. Then he turned back to me, smiling a Ronald Reagan smile. “Why were they trying to kill you?”

“I was to be a sacrifice, to keep the Cold War going, so that everyone could have cushy defense contractor jobs. They were attempting to summon Leviathan, I believe, but Leviathan summoned me to kill them.”

“Well, you’re a very lucky young lady, Ms. Seliger,” he said. And he moved to put the painting into his bag. I grabbed the long sleeve of his robe.

“From whom did you win this painting?”

“Jerome Bernstein, of course,” Riley said. Then, as if I didn’t know, he added, “the artist.”

“And to whom did you lend it?”

“To your father, actually. He thought it would help him with something important.” Riley smiled. “His wife was ill. Was she your mother? I don’t mean to pry. Divorce and remarriage are so common these days. Marriage is but a contract, and contracts are made to be broken.”

“I thought they were made to be kept.”

“Depends on with whom one makes them, I suppose.”

“Yeah . . .” I said. “She was my mother. She’s dead.”

“I’m sorry to hear,” Riley said. “But your father never returned the painting. Did he give it to you?”

“No,” I said. “I found it. Some kid had it.”

“Who?” There was an edge in Riley’s voice now.

“Kid named Greg. Tall, blond. Dirtbag.”

“Oh, I saw him run by,” Riley said. “Were you trying to kill him?”

“No. But
he
had found it at a junk shop. The Greek Orthodox church one.”

Riley muttered
Greek Orthodox
and slapped his thigh. “Oh, well, I suppose I owe your father an apology, then. I bet what happened is that he brought the painting back to my home when I wasn’t home, and gave it to the maid. She was probably . . .” He stopped, and searched for a word. “. . . Perturbed by it and brought it to her priest.”

“You don’t let her into the basement, I know,” I said.

Riley’s smile twitched. I cleared my throat while he composed himself.

“I see,” he finally said.

“What about your wife?”

“Oh, I’m not married. I do hire a woman to come in sometimes, sit around, eat a meal with me. That sort of thing.”

“Weird.”

Riley shrugged. He was very philosophical. I was actually enjoying this conversation. The Leviathan seemed to have retreated. I did not know how to kill this man.

“Well, it’s good for men to have female companionship.
There are many ways to get it. Offer money, love, power . . .”
He glanced at the painting. “Why did you think the painting was yours?”

“I . . . Well, I thought my father was given it by . . .” I coughed again. “ . . . The artist. I knew the artist well. I’d go to his house, sit around, occasionally share a meal with him.”

“Ah,” he said. “So you knew Bernstein.”

“I knew him. Very well, I knew him.”

“It was a tragedy, his suicide.”

“He didn’t commit suicide,” I said. “The gun was in the wrong hand. Someone killed him.”

Riley shook his head. “His Will was his own. But you’re very nearly correct in your suspicions. It wasn’t an everyday suicide.”

“What did you do to him?” I felt it in my stomach, in my throat. It wasn’t the great deep thing, it was just plain rage and bile.

“Ms. Seliger,” Riley told me, “I told him the truth. I initiated him into a higher level. He couldn’t handle it. The truth . . . rewired him. Of course he shot himself with his off hand; his entire
Weltanschauung
had been inverted.” He paused, then the smile returned, full force. “Do you know what
Weltan
—”

“Yeah yeah, worldview.” I wanted to kill him, right here, but he was just so eager to share, so confident in his own powers, that I wanted to hear what he had to say. And also, I was afraid. Leviathan had receded into the dark waters underground. It was just me now, a girl with half-assed understandings of both magick and Marxism, against Mammon.

“Close enough. He and I have worked together for a long time. He was a fucking
genius
, Bernstein was. You were lucky to know him. But sometimes genius isn’t enough.”

“What did you tell him that was so earth shattering that you were able to reverse the fucking polarity of his brain and make him kill himself?” I said. I could tear this man apart with my bare hands, magick or no, j______ or no.

I thought the wrong thing.
Or no
. I gave my bare hands the choice, and my Will left them.
Or no
.

Riley leaned over and whispered a few very potent words in my ear. It was a sentence, a very dense sentence, that summed up years of his life, and all of his metaphysics. They were magic words, well rehearsed. They were lawyer words. Like Bernstein, I am a fucking genius, so I was able to apprehend all that he told me in an instant. To describe it might take a few more words than he used.

Riley’s axiom was a basic one—one generally embraced at the very beginning of magickal practice.
The family, the clan, the state count for nothing; the Individual is the Autarch
. Straight out of
Magick without Tears
. But in the occult world, whatever is exoterically true must certainly be esoterically false, or at least so oversimplified so as to be inaccurate. So Bernstein studied and practiced for years, reached out to master after guru after
sifu
after intellectual, trying to find the deeper secret. The Key to It All.

Riley had been very straightforward—the occult truth is that there is no occult truth. That’s what the Masons at the highest level were to have supposedly heard, once the bag came off their heads and the noose around their necks was loosened.
There is no secret
. Bernstein couldn’t believe it.

So Riley proposed a bet. This was years ago, when they were all in school, with my father. Riley claimed that with the New Aeon dawning, Bernstein and my father would both learn that there was no revolutionary class, no everlasting nation-state, no eternal family, no timeless clan. All that is solid would truly melt into air, forever and ever, world without end. The year was 1968. A general strike had rocked France, the Tet Offensive revealed American imperialism as a paper tiger, and the streets ran red with blood sacrifices, from Nguyễn Văn Lém to Martin Luther King. Riley was a Goldwater man, and had offered the bet even as his candidate was going down to the greatest defeat in a political race that any of the three friends could remember. So of course Bernstein took the bet that in twenty years all the work of the left would be undone, across the world. My father watched them shake hands on it, and grew bitter to be excluded. Dad had always been an extraneous curve in their magic circle; he was the generous kid ready to pay for things in exchange for some company, the guy who could wire a hi-fi system with his eyes closed.

Bernstein also cheated. The painting was a working. A sigil designed to bring down capitalism itself. He poured his blood, sweat, tears, and soul—all literally—into the paint to perfect the spell. Where there was growth, there would be collapse. Bernstein would have preferred a communal order, but he wasn’t against hedging his bet: a burning world of chaos and madness would have been as good as a win to him.

Riley was a kind person. He let the cheat slide, and said that he would just change the terms of the bet. When Riley won, he’d get the painting, as well as the five dollars they had put up. And by 1988, he had won. Reagan was completing his second term, China was on its way to becoming a capitalist superpower, and a little war in Nagorno-Karabakh showed that the Soviets hadn’t supplanted ancient ethnic divisions with class consciousness and a perfected human nature. Bernstein surrendered the painting to Riley, but almost immediately my father asked to borrow it.

What is capitalism but a kind of cancer—society’s economic cells growing out of control, threatening to consume so much that the entire system would die? My father wasn’t convinced that the bet was lost—Nagorno-Karabakh? Really?—and thought he could use Bernstein’s painting to arrest my mother’s cancer. Instead, she sickened and died quickly. Bernstein’s magic did work, just in the wrong way. He had misunderstood that capitalism is always about
creative destruction
. Even Leviathan is only a pawn in that destruction. The individual, just like Crowley said, will always win out over the herd, Riley explained. It’s just a matter of Will.

Then Riley started saying other words. No, not words. Hardly even phonemes. A language older than tongues. He knew the lines that angels whispered in a person’s ear when it was time to die. Hypnosis, the power of suggestion, weaponized neurolinguistic programming invented by the CIA and shared with major capitalists at the finest campaign fundraising dinners and cocktail parties—whatever it was, my own left hand began to shiver and quake. I tried to tell him to stop, but my throat was burning. Then I realized what to do. I focused on my right hand as much as I could, got it into my pocket, and pushed my finger into my spiked ring. Even as my left hand began to rise of its own accord—what was Riley ordering me to do to myself?—I chose the right-hand path.

I punched him in the neck. The air came out of him like a whistle, followed by a stream of blood.

And then I heard the sirens, then the grasping branches of the dead autumn trees were painted red, white, and blue. Fuck it, I ran down the dark street.

I looked back when I heard a thud and a cop car screech to a halt. I don’t know if Riley’s robe really rendered him invisible to agents of the state, but the black-and-white that winged him and sent him flying heels over head sure as hell didn’t see him. Riley hit the asphalt hard, but not hard enough.

I ran across lawns and squeezed through hedges. I had managed to turn myself around completely, and had no idea where I was except that I was away from the sirens. A pair of headlights rolled past me, then a cheap old boat of a car pulled to a stop.

“Hey!” It was Roderick, his head sticking out the passenger-side window. “Get in! We’ve been looking for you. We came back to try to get you!”

I ran for the car—it was a two-door, so squeezing in behind Roderick involved some stunt work and yanking—and tumbled into the back. The driver punched the gas and I lost my balance before ever fully gaining it.

Roderick turned around in his seat and offered me a hand. “So, magick? Fucked-up shit, eh? Please meet my uncle. He was an army medic back in the day, so I thought he could help you.”

I glanced over at the driver, who looked at me from the rearview mirror and smiled. Raymundo! My favorite person in this shithole town.

“Hello. I’m—” he started.

“The light of the world,” I finished.