The Bend of the World: A Novel (2 page)

I laughed and said something dumb like, So I shouldn’t sit on one, and she looked at me like I was a little bit nuts and said, You can totally sit on one.

What time is it? I wondered.

After lunch, Lauren Sara told me. Before dinner.

What should we do?

Do? she said, almost puzzled. She wasn’t the sort of person who moved through life from plan to plan; she rarely determined through any recognizable process of deliberation what task or thought or appointment came next; it was a trait that made we want her, then annoyed me, then made me want her again in an alternating pattern from that first day until the end. I don’t know, man. It might be cool to have sex and then maybe get something to eat?

Now, I wouldn’t necessarily call our first attempt at lovemaking languid. Actually, I probably wouldn’t call it lovemaking. But it did move at its own pace, and it also moved from moment to moment without planning or deliberation, without any sense that either of us was exactly willing it into action. We were on a plaid couch that smelled, not all that unpleasantly, like bread. At one point I realized that a radio was playing, quietly, somewhere across the room; the music had stopped and a baritone voice was asking us to please support classical radio. Then Lauren Sara lifted my face from her salty neck and held it between her hands just above her own and asked me if I was going to come. Slightly surprised—I was used to something a little more feverish—I said, No. Not yet. What about you? Are you close?

Even there, underneath me, with her hands still on my jaw, she managed something like a shrug, and she said, Yeah, it’s cool. I’m not super into orgasms.

We untangled ourselves, dried off with a stiff towel, walked back to my car, and drove to Bloomfield to get some Thai food, which we later marked by mutual consent as our first date.

3

So I was the manager of customer analytics and spend processes, which meant about as much to me as it does to you, at a company called Global Solutions, whose remarkable slogan was, Solutions for a Global World. Actually, I was one of many managers of customer analytics and spend processes, and while this bothered some of my more, uh, career-oriented colleagues, I figured it was for the best, since it meant that I didn’t have to manage anything. Look, people will tell you that corporate America is an insatiable elder god, an implacable, amoral Mammon into whose gaping, bestial jaws flows the life and blood and spirit and dreams and democratic aspirations and so on and so forth of everyone and everything on this not-so-good and no-longer-so-green earth, but let me tell you, if what you really want is to read blogs all day and occasionally take the back stairs down to the largely vacant twenty-third floor to take long, private shits in a single, lockable handicapped restroom and to get paid, like, sixty-five grand for the trouble, then good God, there is no more perfect job.

No, I am serious: the office only crushes your soul if you’re dumb enough to bring it to work. I saw this affliction of the soul take too many of my coworkers. They brought their souls to work with the same foolish trust that impelled them to bring snacks and a bagged lunch. Fuckers will only steal that shit from the shared refrigerator. You’ve been warned.

I liked my job, and it wasn’t even exactly true to say I never worked; I worked, sometimes; I just wasn’t working on Tuesday when Johnny called my office phone and said, Are you working? Let me read you something.

I don’t know, Johnny, I said. I’m about to go into a meeting. When Johnny said, Let me read you something, it never meant, Let me read you this brief and compelling excerpt, this epigram, this interesting quotation, this passage, this page; it meant, Let me read you from here, page thirty-seven, halfway down the page, through page fifty-one; no, you know what, let me start on thirty-four, to give you the fuller context, and go through fifty-eight, which is where the chapter ends. And when he got started, you couldn’t interrupt; there was no, Well, buddy, I’ve actually got to go; once, when we were in college, he’d called me across the country and read to me for an hour and a half from a history of the Merovingian dynasty, so impervious to my attempts to get off the line that I’d eventually just hung up on him, and he’d just called me back and kept going. Which is to say, it was best to head him off before he got started.

But he just said, What meeting? When have you ever gone to a meeting? and started reading:

Dad was military, OSS during the war. Your basic blue-blood type, too, like all the Intelligence boys back then, a Connecticuter, a standard-model Yalie Bonesman. He came to Pittsburgh in the early 1950s to oversee a new office called Industrial Production Planning, or IPP, which was a front for the CIA.

I myself was born in 1949 and, and for much of my life, I’d have told you I had the most ordinary Pittsburgh childhood. Grew up on Linden St., went to St. Bede’s and then Central Catholic, played on a lousy Little League team, gate-jumped at Forbes Field, etc. It was a hell of a city in the day, a great dynamo: the greatest fires stoked in the whole history of the world running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, like the forge of Hephaestus.

Well, as the saying went, it was “hell with the lid off.” Here is the essential point: you cannot burn that hot without releasing some manner of Luciferian energy into the ether.

And that was no accident. Pittsburgh is the one city in the world that perfectly fits the conditions of the prophesied site of the commencement of the Mayan world-end.

Now, what if I were to tell you that the Deep Government of the United States has long known this fact to be true?

I was entirely unaware of this history until 1999, even though I participated in it. My father saw to that. Were it not for certain unique abilities that I was able to conceal from him even at the height of my participation in the Project, this history would have likely remained concealed to this very day.

Through years of ritualized and chemicalized psychic abuse, based on a variety of satanic and priestly indigenous American vision practices, my father split my personality into a set of independent and mutually unaware personality forms. However, my core personality was able to conceal itself behind a subconscious wall-division subconsciously generated by certain psychic abilities, which later assisted in the reintegration of my multiple self-constructs.

What was my father working on? What was this Project?

It was manifold, but it represented over many decades a vast magical working, perhaps unmatched in all human history, a spell enacted by the fire of industry above this most metaphysically significant of landscapes, culminating in two great ritual ceremonies.

First: the linking of two long-sundered Scottish Freemasonic Illuminated Lines, those of Carnegie and Mellon, the line of World Industry and the line of Global Finance, through the merging of the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research in 1967—wherein my own matriculation as a freshman at the new Carnegie Mellon University was in fact the practical cover for the dark working that joined the institutional progeny of the two families and consecrated me, or, that is to say, one of my mind-division self-constructs, as the ritual child-form of that union.

Second: the completion, in 1974, of the great fountain at Point State Park, the magical runic symbol at the convergence of the three superficial and one subterranean rivers, the latter brought to the surface in the fountain itself.

Is it any wonder at all that at that very moment, with the water aspect brought forth through those immense pumps, the fire-aspect of industry was quenched and went into decline?

It is no coincidence at all.

Johnny took a breath. What did I tell you? he said.

Well, I answered as I took a sip from the mug of cold coffee on my desk, that certainly does, uh, seem to bear out your thesis.

Winston Pringle, he said.

What’s a Winston Pringle?

He’s an author. He’s the author.

He sounds British, I said. He sounds like a wanker.

Are you wanking off over there? said Marcy, who worked in the next cubicle.

Totally, I told her. Don’t tell Karla. Karla was in HR.

Who are you talking to? asked Johnny.

Marcy, I said. The lovely occupant of Workstation six-fourteen.

Whoa, Johnny said. They number your work-holes? That’s so satanic. Is your number six-thirteen? That number has extreme significance in Gematria.

Johnny, I really have to go.

So you’re not at six-thirteen?

No, I am. But seriously.

So this book is called
Fourth River, Fifth Dimension
. Apparently Dr. Pringle lives somewhere around here, too. I think we ought to find him. Given recent events. Recent occurrences.

We, I said.

You’ve got eight hours a day and a good Internet connection, Johnny said. Tell Darcy she can help.

Marcy. And I don’t think she’s interested in the long-sundered branches of Freemasonry or whatever. And anyway, I can’t just sit here all day looking up your current crackpot fetish. I have a job. I have shit to do.

Morrison, Johnny said—alone among my friends he called me by my last name—Morrison, you’re fucking nuts. By the way, do you want to be my date to the Jergen Steinman opening thing this weekend? I’m a little hard up in re: the matter of purchasing a ticket, and I figure your grandmother is one of the big Jews at the museum and can get us tickets.

Lauren Sara and I are going. I can totally get you a ticket, though.

Why is she going?

She’s my girlfriend. And she’s an artist. And cetera.

An artist. Misplaced affection has misplaced your critical faculties, brother. She is to an artist as Goodwill is to haute couture.

You are gay, I said.

Fuck off, Johnny said. I don’t want to go anyway. Museums are just massive institutions designed to provide scholar-backed social capital to the notion of art-as-commodity and to reify the artist as a separate caste rather than art as a fundamental human activity. I’d rather not. But seriously, the Pringle thing. Think about it.

What’s the thing again? I asked, but he was already gone.

4

Did you hear? Marcy asked me later that week.

Hear what?

We’re being bought out.

By we, I said, you mean Global Solutions Solutions for a Global World?

None other.

Bought out by whom?

Some European company. Danish, maybe? Pandu didn’t have the details.

Pandu told you? Pandu was a math guy who did something in finance that no one understood; in particular, none of us understood why a guy that smart worked for Global Solutions. What is he, like, Hari Seldon now?

He’s Hindu, I think.

No, what? No, forget it. Europeans? Are we going to get fired?

Probably, Marcy said. Or it could be worse. They might make us work.

5

This thought roiled my brain all week; I had a sweet gig, and the thought that it might be sullied by something that measured out my hours and compensation in deliverables and metrics and benchmarking and the rest of that infernal vocabulary kept me more distracted than usual. That Wednesday over dinner Lauren Sara reminded me that I was supposed to score a pair of tickets to the big art opening. I’d completely forgotten. Do you even want to go? I asked her. Whatever, she said. It’s, like, cool either way. What she meant by this was something like, Fuck you, you moron, I ask you for this one thing, and. Not to say that her voice or demeanor betrayed the slightest hint of it, but you get to know a person. As surely as she’d tried to keep her own background half concealed behind a scrim of shrugs and misdirection, Lauren Sara had set about ferreting out my own relative standing on the social and economic ladder, and if there was one thing that she expected of me, one medium of exchange in our otherwise casual, anarchic relationship, it was that I get us—and her friends, and her roommates—into the good openings and parties, whenever and wherever they occurred.

So I had to call my grandmother, Nanette, to ask if she could get us into the opening reception. She answered on the first ring, but there was a horrible noise in the background, the sound of screams and machinery. Nana, I found myself shouting. It’s Peter.

Who?

It’s Peter!

Peter?

Nana, what’s that noise?

Just a moment, just a moment. The sound faded. Peter? She was back on the line.

Jesus, Nana, I said. What was that?

Oh, some movie or other, she said.

It sounded like a slaughterhouse.

Everything is so violent these days, she replied. Honestly, who watches these things?

Well, you do, apparently.

Oh, I don’t watch. I just like the noise when I’m reading.

Okay, Nana. So what’s new?

What’s new? she said. She was of an age and class that made her sound like a demented Hepburn. What would possibly be new?

I really just meant how are you doing?

Just terribly, but not unusually so. Have you talked to your parents lately? If you do, tell them that I’m wonderful. Tell your mother I’m in a new bloom of youth. Every damn time I tell them how I’m really doing, your mother starts taking my medical history. Needless to say, when I tell her what my own doctors say, she accuses me of lying and drug addiction. Honestly, why your father married that woman.

She’s my mother, Nana.

Well, I certainly don’t blame you for that, my dear. Now, what is new with you? She managed to make it sound like an accusation.

Nothing, I said. Work, the usual.

I hope you’re saving.

Yes, Nana, I’m saving.

For God’s sake, make sure you sock it away, or you’ll wake up one day and find yourself as penurious as me.

I don’t think you’re penurious.

Well, I’m sorry, Peter, but there won’t be one red cent for you when you die.

Uh-huh, I said. Had she misspoken? I didn’t want to get into it. Listen, Nana, I said, I wonder if you could do me a favor.

I may as well, she said. After all, I’m not very long for this world.