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,