The War Against the Assholes (6 page)

Sufficient, though. “There,” said Mr. Stone. Alabama clapped. Charthouse clapped, too. My whole body ached. My nose was bleeding. Mr. Stone took the deck of cards from me. “You must use higher-­quality equipment,” he said. “I stole this one,” I said. “Praise the lord and pass the ammunition,” said Vincent. Loud. Harsh. “Please lower your voice,” said Mr. Stone. “A war,” I said. “Yes,” said Mr. Stone. “Assholes,” I said. “Yes, Mr. Wood. Assholes,” said Mr. Stone. “Are you an asshole?” “I am not,” I said. When you have to choose, you have to choose. You'll have no time to decide. Yet you still have to choose. The inability to choose: that's what afflicts and crushes my generation. “I am glad to hear you say that,” said Mr. Stone, “it is important to know where we all stand.” I blotted my lip. I asked about the book. “Everybody asks about the book,” said Mr. Stone, “I myself asked about it, when I was a younger man.” “That's not an answer, though,” I said. “It is not, I admit, but that is precisely the problem, Mr. Wood. We do not know. Who or what. No one does. There are theories. There are rumors.” “Rumors,” I said. Sweet smoke in my lungs. “The author was either a man of total obscurity or so expert at covering his tracks that even I have been unable to discover them, and I have been looking for fifty years.” Wittgenstein danced and slapped at his whiskers. “Fifty years,” I said. “It is a sad truth that the theurgists have done their best to ensure they remain nothing more than rumors. Nothing more than empty guesses,” said Mr. Stone.
Theurgists
: no idea what it meant. The word Charthouse had used the night I met him. To ask if I served other masters. I assumed they were identical to the assholes Charthouse had mentioned. “And why can I light cigarettes now,” I said, “it seems like a comic book thing.” “First of all, I would not say that you can light cigarettes now,” said Mr. Stone. “Point to you, sir,” I said. “And you do not ask yourself, do you, why you can play football,” said Mr. Stone, “or why you can sleep. The answer is simple: because you can. The book is anamnestic, to speak Platonically. Anyone, as I said, can whistle. Perhaps you remember certain moments on the playing field. Certain sun-flooded moments. Perhaps I, a salamander of fate, to quote one of my most beloved authors, escaped from the clutches of Hitler's minions. Anyone can whistle. And everyone does. Do you understand what I mean, Mr. Wood?”

Anamnestic
and
Platonically
: also bafflers. I caught the general gist. I didn't say a word but I had already sided with him and with Hob, with Charthouse and Alabama, with Vincent, even. Against the assholes. Certain pledges you don't have to make out loud. Certain pledges it's better you keep silent. “By and large we live in ignorance of our abilities,” said Mr. Stone, “which our antagonists prefer.” “Is it magic you're talking about,” I said. “Call it what you like,” said Mr. Stone. He was up now, his hat scraping the ceiling. He swayed. As if in pain. Seemed to be part of his regular stance. “Look,” he said. Pointing at a blank wall on the other side of the audience room. Eighteen feet of space. Rough, marked concrete. I got out of my chair to examine it. “I think this is about your reading level,” said Vincent. “Please save your witticisms,” said Mr. Stone.

The concrete warm against my fingertips. I saw what made it rough: hatch marks, cut into it. Four, then a slash through them. Another four, another slash. What you see in old prison movies. Where they're marking the days of their suffering and confinement. The marks covered the whole wall. Floor to ceiling, nearly. A blank patch near the upper left corner. Waiting to be filled in. “Is this how long you've been down here,” I said. “Even I am not that old, Mr. Wood,” said Mr. Stone. “These represent casualties I have seen. That I am responsible for. In the sense that a commanding officer is responsible for the deaths of his men and women.” Hundreds. Thousands. I counted a few sets. Then gave up. “Casualties,” I said. “Casualties, Mr. Wood,” said Mr. Stone. “Of the assholes,” I said. “Yes, Mr. Wood. Of the assholes,” said Mr. Stone. “And do these assholes have names,” I said. “Their names are legion,” said Vincent. “If there's one thing I will not abide it's misquotation and misappropriation,” said Charthouse.

9

H
e talked a lot about Hitler, the old man. The failed artist, he called him, the true spirit of the bourgeois. His motivations differed from no other second-rater of his era or ours. To be Hitler takes imagination, said Mr. Stone, though not too much; it takes will; it takes a certain inordinate love of reality. I tried to look serious and sensitive. That's what I do when Jews start talking about Hitler. Not that I've been around a lot of Jewish discussions. I remember only one Jewish student during my tenure at Saint Cyprian's, Reed Aschenfarb. He didn't last long. He didn't talk much about Hitler, either. I appreciated the way Mr. Stone had explained my situation to me. No nonsense about my unique nature and important fate. I liked the concept of a war. All adolescents do. He filled me in on the Erzmund problem, too: the best candidate, he said, was Alfons Froch, a professional Viennese gambler and fortune-teller whose checkered and obscure career came to an end when he died of syphilis in the midst of the Russian arrival in Berlin. His corpse, said Mr. Stone, was interred in a pauper's grave, in the shadow of a limeworks. In war, he said, no time is permitted to weep over such matters. Especially when you are the hunted, the quarry. He asked me if I knew what the word
Freiwild
meant. I told him no.

Mr. Stone's front door let us out in a building's garbage alley on Eleventh Avenue. I'd been expecting to return to the tunnel. I didn't show my surprise. I forced my mouth shut. You can't look like an innocent all the time. We had to hop a fence to reach the street. The raw scent of the water washed over us. Charthouse waved good night with his cane head and staggered off. Vincent went with him. He matched Charthouse's gait. My parents were asleep when I got home. They stayed that way. It turned out that
theurgists
meant “practitioners of ritual magic.”
Anamnestic
meant “that which enables our recollections.” The name he'd mentioned, Alfons Froch, appeared in my dream, other­wise unremarkable. I was alone in a meadow. At night. Great sky above. The dizzying health of the stars. I recognized no constellations. And the shapes of the distant trees at the meadow edge seemed alien too. Even the smell of the grass, strong and strange. A tall woman with pale hair was walking among the trees, her face turned half-away. Crows croaked. Water glinted in a stone basin. At the edge of which, along the lip, ran the simple, incomprehensible words
ALFONS FROCH
.
In large yellow letters. Like a
NO PARKING
announcement on a curb. I woke up at dawn. I remembered fragments of my dream: a pale female face. A black bird. I did not feel tired. I'd slept four hours at most. My throat raw from the cigarettes. That's all. I wanted to laugh aloud.

Theurgists went to special schools, said Mr. Stone, a network of primary and secondary schools spanning the world. Most of them came from theurgist families, whole families, Mr. Stone said, of the obsequious and mighty. They spent their childhoods studying for the Certamen, also known as Damnation Day. A test, said Mr. Stone, a tragedy. I asked him if it was like the salto. Theurgists frown on our more immediate methods, he said. There was one such school in Manhattan, called Mountjoy House. I'd never heard of it. The chief patron of Mountjoy House was a man named Verner Potash, who also served as the de facto
head of the theurgical community on the East Coast. The legend of Mountjoy is known far and wide, said Mr. Stone, and you would find echoes of it in all manner of mendacious and saccharine books. The school had existed more or less since the Dutch first arrived on these shores, originally under the supervision of a man called Godfried Brink. When the colony had fallen to English control the institution changed hands and changed names. William Mountjoy served in the Cabal Ministry of King Charles II, said Mr. Stone. An eminent scholar, he said, among the greatest of his age.

Hob rustled and groaned. Dawn, blue-gray dawn, in the windows. Alabama asleep in my desk chair, snoring. A higher register than my mother. Arms loose, feet on the floor. Her pistol on my desk, next to the biology textbook. The book's yellow cover displaying an enormous photo of a grasshopper's face and mandibles. The gun's huge barrel pointed at the door. Hob lay on my rag rug, underneath his coat, a ball of dust kicking around in his exhalations. He and Alabama both looked pale and weak in the morning light. They'd come home with me. I'd invited them. I didn't want to be inhospitable.

De facto
: I had to dredge that one up. As in not de jure. Not by right. Simply by brute fact. Potash is the informal name for potassium salts. That I knew from my mother. The rest of Mr. Stone's lecture gripped me because it was absolutely strange to me. Nothing exerts the same hold on you as the completely unknown does. Like: theurgy's success depended on incantation, formulae, alchemical techniques, wands. In other words, theurgy's success depended on fear and weakness, said Mr. Stone, as the cigarette smoke thickened around us. It seemed to me a white spotlight had isolated us from Hob, Alabama, Charthouse, and Vincent. Like we sat alone, in deep, slow discussion, on a stage. Theurgy has its roots in the early priesthoods of man, the Sumerian, the Greek, the Judaean, the Zoroastrian, said Mr. Stone. I listened. Theurgy is not in fact different from religion, in the sense that it requires supplication and nothing more. Humans, he said, are constantly hunting, forever seeking and finding an idol to abase themselves before. For centuries, theurgy had been the dominant form of magic practiced in the West and the East. While most theurgists never attained public, historical prominence, Mr. Stone said, notable exceptions existed. Adolf Hitler, he said, had been a minor theurgist and had enjoyed the aid of one of the greatest theurgists of the twentieth century, Rudolf von Sebottendorf. The art Mr. Stone practiced had no name. Call it what you like, he said again and again, it would be an act of presumption to give it a name. Like all slaves, he said, theurgists were full of irony, anger, and presumption to authority.

From my bed, my dream of the concrete pool draining away, I watched Alabama. I admit it. Her skin looked fragile. Bruise-blue hollows under her eyes. I watched Hob. He grinned in his sleep. I thought about how to explain her presence to my parents. Hob they would not object to. I'd never brought a girl home before to spend the night. What the theurgists tell us requires study and paraphernalia requires only courage and will, said Mr. Stone. I hefted Alabama's gun. Rubber bands corrugated its butt. I quick-drew three times, into my mirror. “You talking to me,” I said. Dark circles under my eyes. Inexplicable bruises along my ribs.

The nature of war, said Mr. Stone, was simply the tyrannical nature of the majority making itself known. He bore no grudge against the theurgists, he called them slaves only because they were. Slaves of what? Call their masters what you like. His pet rats kept stone-still as he spoke. Since the Treaty of Constantinople, he said, when, perhaps, the theurgists realized for the first time what an advantage they had in numbers, this war against their freer compatriots had been unceasing. Mass exiles. Mass killings. The crushing under the heel of the most innocent and helpless. Those who wished merely to save their families. To grow crops. To protect their wives and children. Those who wished to fly unaided. Without rods or staves. Without incantations. In the smoke I saw images. A long, gray line of oxcarts snaking across a far horizon, between the green grass and the blue sky. A man dressed in red robes, carrying a crosier in one hand and a dagger in the other, limping toward the naked throat of a young woman chained to an oak board. Her head shaved, her legs spread, her arms bound, her irises slate blue, her mouth clenched in anger or pride.

My head still ached. I crept into the hall. My mother still snored. My father was already awake. Not a catastrophe. He had no reason to be suspicious of anything. “Morning, professor,” he said, “more wind sprints last night?” I told him yes. “Well, it's not so much me but your mother gets worried,” he said. “She's still asleep,” I said. “She fell asleep pretty early, too, not even one,” he said. My mother's deep sleeping had served as a joke of long standing between us. “Sawing logs,” I said.

Mr. Stone himself was a victim. Before the Second World War he had been a mathematician in Berlin. In the field of harmonic analysis. He told me when I asked what it was that he could not explain concisely. I told him that was all right: I never pretended to be a genius at math. He was no genius either, he said, just a humble observer. As such he could not explain the events of that war, he said, other than as Hitler's search for Froch, or rather von Sebottendorf's search for Froch, who managed to elude him, who managed to escape, said Mr. Stone, into the arms of an obscure and sordid death. This search had claimed as incidental casualties Mr. Stone's wife and child, his promising career. His life. Mr. Stone's wife and child had been named Helen and Gerhard. He'd wanted the boy to have a German name, to avoid the kicks and insults he had suffered due to the alien nature, he said, of his own name. At that time he had not even known who Froch was, he was innocent of any expertise, he had only discovered Froch's work in the Mauthausen concentration camp, when a fellow prisoner named Weisbrod introduced him to it. This fellow prisoner was soon executed for being unable to work. He died in a ditch, shot at the base of his skull, his face submerged in a shallow, muddy pool. Mr. Stone had taken his book, and thus taken the first step on the unpredictable path that led him to this redoubt, he said, beneath the streets. At Mauthausen he'd seen one of Sebottendorf's minions saw a woman in half. Not as an illusion. In order, he said, to provide enough blood and agony to appease the powers he believed he served. Mountjoy House, he said, was not of course Mauthausen. Yet the fundamental nature of man does not change, and a murderous slave is still a slave. Verner Potash was a Jew. He was not suggesting anything to the contrary. Nonetheless you might see in the events of the Second World War a logical end to the activities of the theurgists. The great trample the little and the strong trample the weak. That, said Mr. Stone, was the method of the human world.

“Got any big plans for break,” said my father. “Nothing special,” I said, “there's really not a lot going on. I mean other than Christmas.” “Your grandmother is coming,” said my father, “so we'll have to hide the liquor.” As long as Hob and Alabama stayed in my room, I'd be fine, I calculated. I didn't trust either of them to do so, was the problem. I could just see Alabama waltzing out into the living room to thank my parents for their hospitality. Gun and all. Hob they wouldn't mind, although I'd heard them express the opinion, once, that both he and Vincent were weirdos, as were their parents, Padraig (“He changed the spelling of his name, for Christ's sake,” as my father put it) and Laura. My father wore his tennis clothes: a crimson tracksuit and white shoes, which he cleaned every Sunday with a toothbrush, and a yellow sweatband across his forehead. He was gulping water. He advocated early-­in-the-day hydration as a cure-all. He seemed to be correct. I can't remember him ever being sick. I removed a glass from the prongs of the dishwasher, to fill it. “What's that on your arm,” he said, “is that a tattoo?” I looked. I saw. I crowed out a laugh. I'd managed to forget it happened. Compared to the rest of the night it was a minor event.

Hob was already mostly unconscious when I got inked. “Good night, sweetheart, weeeeeel, it's time to go, ba-da-dum-da-duuum,” he crooned. Seconds later: deep breaths. As a result I had to sit stiffly on the edge of my bed, avoiding staring at Alabama, who was leafing through my biology textbook. Each page made a loud, precise crack as she turned it. We had my desk lamp for light. Nothing else. Alabama kept yawning, and she spun my chair around—the mechanism squealed—and lurched over toward me, grinning, her eyelids half-down. My pulse started to race. I started to reach for her. She grabbed my right arm. Her fingers dug in hard under the bracelet of fortune. She pushed up my sleeve and placed her index finger against my forearm. “Ready,” she said. I nodded. I was. For anything. She made a few quick, firm, curving strokes against my skin. Tongue extruded in concentration. She didn't speak while she was tracing these lines and she didn't look at me, she looked at my inner forearm. She passed out in my desk chair right afterward and I hadn't bothered to examine her work. I saw now: It was the symbol. From Mr. Stone's green door. The schematic outline of an open eye. Neatly, blackly inked into my skin halfway between elbow and wrist. I scrubbed at it. No pain. Nothing.

“It's a team thing,” I said to my father, “it's just for football.” “You better hope it's temporary,” said my father.