“I trust you,” you say.
For the next seven days, the house reeks of bitter incense and herbal candles that Abi’s had custom made—tall candles placed at the four corners of your bed, sallow in hue, with dark thready stuff embedded in the wax. The overall scent reminds you of a Paris outdoor market (which you visited one undergrad summer), but damper and more cloying. Abi speaks rarely, but you gather she’s purifying herself for a ritual that must be performed soon. She sits naked on the bed, meditating for hours, and when she’s not in bed, she’s bent over the kitchen table, scribbling symbols on scraps of paper, which she will burn later in the special candles, as if she’s writing cheat sheets for a supernatural exam; or she’s taking baths in hot water so dense with herbs, a greenish brown matte is left in the tub after it drains. Twice a day, she asks you to fuck her Yab-Yum style, with you sitting in as close to a Lotus position as you can manage and her facing you, astride you, scarcely moving. During these encounters, her eyes roll back, the whites visible beneath half-lowered lids, and at such moments you appreciate the strangeness of her sexuality, its eerie mix of the sublime and the sensual; but you mainly appreciate her power. It’s like you’ve embraced a dynamo. She throbs and shivers, undergoes surges of heat and tremor. Even after you’ve disengaged, you feel her energies coursing around you.
You no longer doubt that she has the power to cripple you (okay, maybe there’s a little doubt), and while you can’t quite wrap your head around the whys and wherefores, how a union of crippled men and friendly, kicked-out-of-the-club angels and Tantric witches is going to be of much help to the world in its hour of need, you’ve gone a ways toward conceding that she and her pals might have the power to avert a planetary disaster, or at least to minimize it. The issue of trust…well, you understand that trust isn’t really at issue. You’ve been drawn into unnavigable waters, committed yourself to Abi’s deep, and you have no choice except to let her steer. If it eventuates that you’ve opened yourself to a particularly vile form of torment, if Abi turns out to be a psychotic, or the embodiment of a demoness, or a more ordinary crippler of men, a deluded Goth chick who’s wrong about everything, you’ll have to deal with that. And you will. You’ll find a way. You won’t be anybody’s chump. With that settled in your mind, you give up your pursuit of answers and live as happily as you can in the green house—it seems to have gone green from the fresh charge of her vitality, so much so that you half-expect the furniture to put forth sprigs of leaves and blossoms—and assist Abi by fielding her phone calls.
The first four days of Abi’s purification, you catch twenty, thirty calls a day, all announcing themselves by giving their first name and the call’s point of origin. This is Frannie from San Diego, Ted from Vero Beach, Rene from Medelin, Jonathan from Perth, Lisa from San Francisco, Terry from Madison, Pat from London, Syd from Duluth, Pauline from Chapel Hill, Jean-Daniel from Nantes, Lamon from Paris (“Kentucky, dude…”), Patrice from Diamante, Juana from Taxco, and so on. They don’t need to speak to Abi, they say. Just mention they called. Most sound young. Since the phone hardly ever rings under normal circumstances, you assume these folks are the mystic warriors of her alliance signaling that they’re ready to rock n’ roll. Your personal favorite is Mauve from Oberlin, whose voice is such a fey, wispy instrument, you imagine a pixie hovering beside the receiver, and that two other pixies have helped her lift a pencil that dwarfs them to punch in the number. There’s Marko from Volgograd (baritone)—you picture a bullfrog the size of a compact car wearing a tattered pro-Satan T-shirt. Ving from Chiang Mai (lisping tenor) becomes a gecko in a spandex body stocking. Anne from Mataplan (grating contralto) you morph into a Sasquatch transvestite. You become downright chatty with some of the callers—making light of what’s happening helps dispel your nervousness. On the fifth and sixth days you receive far fewer calls, but you get one that, albeit brief, achieves the opposite effect.
“Hello.”
“This is Rem…from Olympia.” A hoarse voice that sounds squeezed-out, as if he’s been gutshot or has a great weight on his chest and, unable to use his diaphragm, it’s an effort to speak. He may have, as well, a slight accent.
“Abi can’t come to the phone. Take a message?”
“Tell her…I called.”
Like, “Tell her…” Gasp, shudder, gasp. “…I called.”
“Hey, Rem?”
A grunt that may have been a mangled, “Yeah.”
“They say the eagle flies on Friday.”
Silence, then: “I don’t…understand.”
“It’s the password, guy. You’re supposed to say, ‘I have yet to feel its shadow.’”
“Abi told us…you had an…inelegant sense of humor.”
“She did, huh? She used that word? Inelegant?”
A round of heavy breathing, then: “Fool.”
The seventh morning, Abi makes a few calls of her own; she cautions you that tonight, should you wake and find her still involved in the ritual, you’re not to interfere, you’re to keep clear until she tells you otherwise. She pounds home this point until she’s sure you grasped it, then retreats into seclusion. You try to study, but give up after an hour and veg out on the living room sofa, alternately napping and catching up on your comic book reading. It’s late afternoon, already dark outside, and you’re deep into Alan Moore’s collected Promethea, when Abi emerges from the bedroom, goes into the kitchen, and fixes you a cup of herb tea. You take a sip. The taste is horrid. You ask what’s in it, but Abi’s not communicating. She’s withdrawn, pulled back inside herself; she urges you to drink it all and returns to the bedroom, leaving you to contemplate a cupful of brackish liquid with pieces of brown vegetable matter floating on the surface. You know it’s a drug—nothing else could taste that bad—but you drink it. At heart, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, you can’t accept any of this. Teen witches versus the Apocalypse. It’s just not happening. The only part to which you lend the slightest credence is the possibility that your back will get screwed up and, at this juncture, that’s not enough to do more than give you pause.
An hour, two hours, or twenty minutes later, you’re not sure, your sense of time has been wrecked, and you’re not sure about anything, especially your decision to drink the tea. You’ve passed through a period of sweats, intense physical discomfort, and major stomach pain, and now, though your head’s not in a bad place, it’s not a particularly good place, either. It seems you’re sitting beside a fire, included in a circle of old half-naked men, who’re talking in booming voices, in a language you don’t understand, and you’re terribly confused—you get that they’re discussing you, that by being there you’re making a kind of expiation, but you’re confused by the flickering firelight, by noises in the vegetation beyond the light, by an inner unsteadiness. Furthering your confusion, this hallucination winks on and off, and, when it’s off, you have a distorted view of the room, of yourself lying sweaty and disheveled on the sofa, tossing and turning. There’s this relationship stuff about your mom, too. Scenes revisited from the past. Arguments, emotional confrontations, and the like, replayed at lightning speed, a fast-forward mind movie. Your dad’s in some scenes, but he’s a peripheral figure. It’s all about your mom, really, and you’re overwhelmed with sadness on realizing that these conflicts remain unresolved. And then you re-experience your first childhood memory. You’re two or three, you still have blond hair, and you’re playing on a hooked rug, the sunlight falling around you, and you’re seeing yourself from a height, from your mom’s perspective, through her eyes, her mind, and you feel love, the powerful bond between mother and child that can never be entirely broken…Suddenly you’ve left pain and confusion behind. You’re in a small boat passing along a green river, bordered by low jungle. This is no ordinary river, you understand, but the river of time. A metaphor made visible by drugs and Tantric sex, a stand-in for the literal functioning of time, which—for reasons doubtless plain to Steven Hawking, but unclear to you—cannot be grasped by the human mind. Though it’s a metaphor, it’s an unusually accurate one. Its currents and eddies are representative of actual structures within the timestream and now, somehow, you’ve become separated from it…or not separate, exactly, but able to control your movements within its medium. How you know all this, you’re not certain, but you suspect the old men of having imparted this knowledge. You sense them close by, but they’re no longer participants in your life, merely observers. You find that you can switch off the hallucination at will, but the house is too cluttered for your tastes, too modern in its complexity, so you go with the flow of the green, green river, content to lie back, thinking long riverine thoughts, letting its serene currents carry you nowhere and everywhere the same…