The Necromancer's House

1

This is what Andrew does at the AA meeting.

He says his piece when he has to.

He translates the God stuff in his head so it makes sense to him.

He tries very hard to let the new people know he’s listening to them—he brightens his speech when he says “Hi, [new person]” and “Thanks, [new person],” and he does his best not to categorize them into will-be-back, won’t-be-back, because that feels just a little too black-and-white, sheep-and-goats Manichean to him, and one thing Andrew Ranulf Blankenship is not about is black and white.

He is a calm-eyed icon of gray areas.

And if he does sometimes think, That guy’s just here because it’s part of his DUI deal or That woman’s going to drive into the parking lot of the Driftwood Bar and Grill and back out again three times tonight before she turns her car off and trots in with her head down, he chides himself afterward.

Who are you to caricature them?

What do you really know, O wise seer?

If you saw someone like yourself walk in, would you know what you were? Could there be two of you within driving range of this rural Presbyterian church? And how did it feel to have them all look at you when you first came? And know that some of them were thinking, Probably a faggot, and some were thinking, Belongs in the city with that hair.

Not that new people come in so very often, or that they’re really all that new. The woman who’ll probably go to the Driftwood buys produce at the Orchards—he’s seen her with her faintly electric bottle-red hair and the buzz-cut child who pulls at her sleeve and whines like he’s two years younger than he looks. The DUI guy he doesn’t know, but a Lexus pulled up and ejected him while Andrew smoked with his friends.

More about them in a minute.

DUI guy probably found the meeting online in Rochester and drove out to the sticks to make damned sure the Anonymous part of Alcoholics A stuck.

Looks like a real estate agent, maybe a high-end car salesman, some industry that’s been whomped and he’s one of the last ones standing, barely hanging on by his martini habit, which stretched from three after work to four and he thought he was just getting a speeding ticket when the young-enough-to-be-his-nephew cop said, “Have you been drinking, sir?” and his heart skipped a beat, make it two, and he peed just a little in his khakis and tried on his first pair of handcuffs. When we pass the basket he’ll be all slick and fold his court-ordered attendance slip in a dollar bill, make it a five because he’ll want to show us he’s making it okay, and then the basket will come floating back with nothing in it but the signed slip and make its way to him like a homing pigeon and he’ll sheepishly pluck it out and pocket it. So much for discretion. I prefer the DUI guys who drop their slip in like an ace-queen in blackjack, defiantly, BOOM, fuck everybody in the ROOM.

I’m doing it again.

Motor-minding, shitty-committee.

Knock it off, Blankenship.

So Andrew blinks his lazy icon eyes and listens to tonight’s chairperson (Hi, Bob!) talking about humility, and just for fun (and exercise—the exercise never stops) he dims the good Presbyterian fluorescents above their yellowing Presbyterian screens, stopping before Bob notices, then brightens them again, stopping before any of them pop.

Chancho and Anneke both look at him.

Chancho the honcho and Anneke-Harmonica.

They of the smoking troika that watched the Lexus birth the DUI guy.

Chancho looks at him in a guilty Mexican Catholic stop-fucking-around way. Because this is guero God but still God’s house and you’re just lucky he doesn’t strike you down for being a brujo in the first place.

Anneke, who wants to and will be a bruja because Andrew is teaching her, side-eyes him as if she’s unsure whether he is the source of the phenomenon. His icon eyes reveal nothing. He casually reforks the samurai-style bun on top of his head, though, and she knows he’s doing that to fool Chancho into thinking he’s too distracted to fuck with the lights and to let her know that he’s fucking with the lights.

She wishes he were a woman.

He wishes she liked men.

Chancho wishes the meeting were over so he could go home for another plate of his wife’s mole enchiladas and an hour of UFC on Spike.

Andrew’s only real complaint about this particular group is that they run a more-than-normally religious meeting. Stands to reason, out in the sticks like this. Still beats the darkly secular town chapter with its constant friction between doomsaying bleeding deacons and cigarette-mooching relapse punks.

During the hand-holding Lord’s Prayer, only Anneke and Andrew are silent. That was what first made them notice one another, their shared agnosticism. And the fact that, except perhaps for Laura (Hi, Laura!), a runner-up for Miss New York in 1999, they are the two most empirically attractive people in the room, misaligned gender preferences (hers, not his) aside.

2

Andrew and Anneke drive to Dunkin Donuts and have coffee (his with cream, hers as black as a raven’s beak), then farther into Oswego to shoot pool at the waterfront bar. They are both far enough along in their sobriety to be comfortable in a bar, and they both enjoy pool enough to tolerate the clientele. In the twenty years Andrew has made his home in nearby Dog Neck Harbor, he has come to Oswego periodically for those things one goes to town for when one lives in a hamlet, pool and bowling being two of them, but he has never understood Oswego’s denizens.

Oswego hurts his feelings a little, with its redbrick waterfront buildings still faintly overlettered with hundred-year-old advertisements (Enjoy refreshing Coca-Cola! It still has cocaine!) wasted on its aesthetically impaired youth; with just a little artistic umph, just a thimbleful of intellectual zeitgeist, just one really banging university, this town could have been a tiny Amsterdam, a waterfront Ithaca. Instead, it… well, isn’t.

In the twenty years Andrew has been coming here, he has watched the town smother almost every good restaurant it birthed. French bistros, Indian buffets, from-scratch hippie bakeries, quirky greasy spoons. And the names… Casa Luna, The Coach House, Wahrendorf’s Diner, the Little While. Oh, the closing of the Little While hurt. The seafood marinara fed three; it was so thick with garlic that slivers of it stuck to your fork, and so generous with seafood that you had to push aside the shrimp and fish to get to the mussels, then opened a mussel to find it packed in with more shrimp and fish.

And the pancakes at Wahrendorf’s.

“Fucking Wahrendorf’s,” he says, punching the last word to give his cue more chi as he breaks. Sinks a colored and a stripe.

“Fucking Wahrendorf’s,” Anneke agrees.

A lad in droopy shorts, a wife beater, and a baseball cap (twenty years and the Oswegian wardrobe hasn’t changed any more than the appetite for cheap fried food and sports bars) saunters over with three quarters in his hand, but Anneke stacks six quarters on the table and shoots him a look that makes him veer to the jukebox instead. Andrew ignores him and turns his icon eyes to the task of sinking two more solids.

The boy goes back to his friends, also wearing their regulation tank tops and baseball caps, and makes them whinny with laughter at something. Andrew looks too small and exotic to be worth punching, and Anneke looks like she might throw a good punch herself.

No glory there.

“I’ve been thinking about your middle name. Why Ranulf?”

He pauses, hip on table, just about to take a flashy behind-the-back stab at a tough corner-pocket shot, and thinks about his long-ago ancestor.

“I mean, from what you’ve told me about your parents, I don’t see them pulling out some King-Arthury name like that.”

Andrew imagines Ranulf Blenkenshope, the first known proto-Blankenship, dodging piles of sheep pellets near the smoky Northumberland hovel in which a wife stirs the bland bubbling blankenfood that will keep them and their wan brood alive through another rainy thirteenth-century winter.

“It beats Randolph. I changed it when I was in college. For funsies.”

He misses his shot, his concentration bifurcate.

“And since when is an Anneke Zautke so ready to spar about names? It sounds like you should be wearing clogs.”

Suddenly curious about what she is wearing on her feet, Andrew glances at her Middle-Easternish sandals, sees the slightly chipped green toenail polish. Anneke has handsomely shaped feet. She has handsomely shaped everything. And she dresses well, not just well for a lesbian.

She hates that word.

3

“I hate that word,” she had said. “It sounds like something cold-blooded.”

“It is,” he had said, and she had frog-knuckle-punched him right between the scant muscles of his arm.

Hard.

That had been the night they first attempted to be lovers; the movie they had watched together was over, the bruschetta she had made all gone save for the sliver of basil and crust of cheese drying to the plate. She kissed him more out of loneliness than passion, finally taking him to bed for a self-conscious romp they both mostly laughed through, especially the application of the condom.

Now I Ranulf, king of the Britons, draw my weapon, sheathe it (lo, it droopeth) (a little help, please) (Ah! Excalibur!), and sheathe it again, as is my right.

Shut up and do this if you’re going to.

Verily, Lady.

It was clear that her love for him was above the waist, and always would be, no matter how feminine his bone structure or how exotic the scents he wore in his long black hair. His deeper scent was masculine, his angles too hard, his tongue too big in her mouth.

He knew there were spells he might use to make her burn for him, but burn she would; the further the subject was from true desire, the more damage the incantation would do. Suicide, insanity, and illness were the long-term fruits of love’s abuse, by magic or otherwise, as so many had written and so few believed.

Andrew believed.

He had seen what happened to those who loved him over the two decades since the witch’s raven had left its peck in him.

Sarah.

Anneke would be safe from the raven’s beak.

The curse that murdered those he loved who loved him back.

She would not love him, and if he loved her, that was his blood to bleed.

I guess Papillon was the wrong movie to try to seduce you with.

Maybe not. You fuck like you’ve got money up your ass.

Wait a minute, I thought I was Papillon, not Dustin Hoffman.

You were Dustin Hoffman.

4

She had sculpted him twice.

The first time wearing his Japanese robe and sitting with his elbows on his thighs, head slightly bent and cocked to one side like a bohemian The Thinker, and she had kept that one.

It sat on the table by her smoking chair, the chair facing the lake, lording over the camel-bone ashtray her sailor father had gotten in Egypt. Sometimes she stuck incense sticks in the space between the statue’s arm and thigh and burned them so they veiled his head in smoke, but mostly she just puffed her Camel Lights and watched sunsets or storms or waves lapping at the weird ice figures framing the beach in winter. He liked it that a smaller version of himself kept her company.

The second statue had been larger, life-sized, a nude, and it was so lifelike she sold it for four thousand dollars at an art show in Ithaca. She had barely had it a month but needed the money, and she would not sell it to Andrew because his offer felt like charity. She wanted to see what she could get from a stranger.

And so a man from Toronto took home her best statue, a statue of one of America’s most powerful wizards buck naked in white clay, and put it in his basement near a red felt pool table.

It was titled Nonchalance, and the Canadian never lost another game of pool under Andrew’s bored stone gaze, even against much better players, nor did he ever guess why.

5

Anneke is not made for interiors; there is something smaller, something caged and wrong about her in the bar, as there is whenever she finds herself beneath a roof.

She is too big for the space.

Andrew’s mind’s eye favors snapshots of Anneke outside, building something out of wood or sculpting it out of clay and slurry; her shag of dirty blond hair, just beginning to gray, has been woven to drink sunlight; if she carries a hammer, tan suede gloves cul-de-sac her strong, brown forearms; if she sculpts at her outside table, her jeans are crusted at the thighs where she wipes her hands on them, and she does not sit, but circles her creation counterclockwise as she coaxes its true shape and name from it.

Just walking across the lawn she has the air of a lioness whose mate had best not be sleeping in her favorite spot.

Andrew knew he loved her when he first saw sunlight on her.

That had been two years before.

He let himself love her because he knew she would not love him back.

6

Anneke Zautke has been out of prison for six years now, mostly sober for eight. She bought her odd, sloped little A-frame house by the lake so she could be close enough to visit her chronically ill father in the little town of Mexico,

Leukemia? Will you die?

Eventually.

It’s not fair, Dad. You just… retired.

I sailed nuclear subs. Nobody made me do that. Nobody made me work at the plant. Shit happens.

but far enough away from Oswego and Syracuse not to see anyone she knew before.

She makes a decent living selling statues and earthenware mugs at art shows and Renaissance festivals, and her house, like Andrew’s, is hard to find.

Anyone who makes a hobby of harassing sex offenders will have a long, winding drive to Anneke’s property and back. Nobody has yet tried, but she has another twelve years to go before her name disappears from the registry.

Shelly Bertolucci had been sixteen.

Shelly had been so relieved to find someone else in Oswego who loved like she did that she didn’t care about consequence.

Consequence can be lopsided, though.

Consequence was one thing for Shelly, and quite another for the pretty young art teacher fresh from Cornell who introduced her to cabernet, Rodin, Edith Piaf, and her first thirty orgasms.

Anneke Zautke got the maximum four-year sentence for statutory rape and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. This despite her lawyer’s exhaustive coaching.

She was in braces when it started, right?

Yep.

Every time you think about sitting upright and tough, doing that Marlene Dietrich thing, remember they’re going to show the jury pictures of a little girl in braces.

So, what, slouch?

Sit like someone who knows she had sex with a little girl in braces.

Show me what that looks like.

Will you be funny like that in maximum with girls who shot people?

Anneke had been unable to properly display remorse, because the truth was she felt none.

She wished she had had someone to light her way through the purgatory of a homosexual adolescence in west-central New York, and saw her willingness to do the same for Shelly as an act of personal valor.

Anneke had also been drinking a bottle and a half of wine a night and self-medicating, both with cocaine and with antidepressants she got online from India, so her ability to discern between empowerment and exploitation was…

Suspect.

When they’re showing the braces pictures, are they going to show any of the sculptures Shelly made in class?

Why?

Because they’re not bad. She really started… growing. Artistically.

What, because she was having sex with you?

…

Actually, yes.

7

Andrew takes her home.

The grass is growing high now that summer has settled in for keeps, and the stars are an opera out here.

He walks around to her side and opens the door for her. The car is a ’68 Ford Mustang, so the door is heavy and squeaks on its hinge. She lets him let her out; it is her act of chivalry toward him.

“The stars,” he says.

“Yep.”

“I have something for you. It’s in the trunk.”

“Is it a puppy?”

“Well. Actually it’s a basilisk, so don’t look it in the eye.”

“What’s a basilisk?”

“Something you shouldn’t look in the eye.”

She goes to light a cigarette.

“Don’t yet.”

It hangs from her lip as he opens his trunk and pulls out something book-sized in oriental paper from the card shop in Oswego.

“You wrap like shit.”

“I only try when I care.”

She likes this.

She pulls a folding knife from her pocket and slits the paper, cigarette jutting upright Franklin Delano Roosevelt–style because she’s grinning like a little girl. Because nobody gives presents like Andrew Ranulf Blankenship.

The book has a red cover and black print, cheaply glued bindings. Somebody did this at home, or maybe with the help of a FedEx Office. She thumbs through it, squinting in the starlight. The text is two thirds photocopied hand script from the 1800s, one third badly typed Smith-Corona, impossible to read in this dim light, but probably no easy task under a lamp.

“A spell book.”

“The originals are more powerful, of course, but that’s why they’re priceless. With study and practice you may be able to get a few tricks out of this, especially Rudnick’s stuff. He started as a potter, too. Working with clay and stone as much as you do should give you that sweet-spot intuition.”

“Can you do the things in here?”

“Not easily. Nor well. But I never tried very hard at these arts. Not my specialty.”

“How did you get this one?”

“With my specialty.”

She knows the answer even as she asks it. They rarely buy anything. They barter. They are a community unto themselves, spread out across the globe, known to each other by reputation and now, thanks to the Internet, able to communicate in real time with science’s answer to (and improvement upon) the crystal ball. No doubt Andrew performed some act of film necromancy (speaking with the dead via film media captured while they lived) for another of his kind who rewarded him with this book.

His kind.

A wizard.

But he hates that word.

8

“Thanks for the book, great wizard.”

“I hate that word. It sounds like something cold-blooded.”

“It is.”

He pantomimes punching her arm.

“So what do I call you?”

“There’s no good word for it. Most of us say user. But that sounds like a smackhead.”

“Magic user?”

“That’s Dungeons and Dragons.”

“Oh. I never played.”

“I did.”

“No shit, a dork like you. But what do I call you?”

He thinks. Plays with his samurai bun.

“I like magus.”

“Sounds pretentious.”

“I know. But it’s better than wizard. Magician’s a guy with a top hat who fakes it. Brujo isn’t bad, but Chancho makes a face when he says it. Male witch. Going to hell. Communes with demons.”

“Don’t you?”

“What? No!”

“What’s that thing by the train tracks?”

“Not a demon.”

“What, then?”

“An… entity.”

“That you summoned with a spell to do your bidding, but fucked up and it won’t go away now. Sounds like a demon.”

Andrew doesn’t say anything.

9

10

Anneke leans on the car next to Andrew, their hips almost touching.

“So if I get good at this stuff…”

“Yes.”

“Become luminous, as you put it…”

“You are luminous.”

“But develop it.”

“Yes.”

Their faces are close enough to kiss and they probably would, such is the warmth between them, had they not already explored that dead end. The stars sing on, quietly, breaking hearts.

The 302 engine cools and ticks under the Mustang’s hood.

“Will I attract weird shit, too?”

A cool breeze makes the trees say hush.

Andrew turns his almond eyes up to look at the firmament. As in see where Christ’s blood streams in. As in The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus, by one Christopher Marlowe.

Who also played with.

Fire.

Attracted weird shit.

A murderer’s knife in his irreplaceable brain.

A satellite hurtles, a bright grain of fairy dust, a second hand overtaking the flashing minute hand of an airplane far and farther below it. The wonders one sees for the price of a head tilt, a second of humility and presence.

“The entity came because I called it, using a very dangerous spell book I was warned not to use at all.”

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.

“But you attract other things. Salvador, for example.”

“I made Salvador.”

“I know. But there’s that lady. From the lake. The dead mermaid.”

“She’s not precisely a mermaid.”

“You said she has a tail.”

“In the water.”

“Not a mermaid.”

“Not like the kind you’re thinking of.”

“But she is dead.”

“She died.”

“But not really.”

“She came back with a tail.”

“I’ve seen her here, you know.”

“Are you sure?”

“Am I sure? She smells like fish cunt.”

“One gets used to it.”

Anneke gives him a raised eyebrow that says, Oh really? So you’re actually fucking that? to which he flattens his mouth and blinks his eyes twice, thus responding, What if I am, my Sapphic nonpareil?

“I’ve told her not to bother you.”

“Well, tell her again. I saw her shiny raccoon eyes in the trees more than once, and she leaves that god-awful smell. She creeps me the fuck out. What’s the word again? For what she is.”

“Rusalka.”

“She better not be fishtailing around here stalking me in some jealous fit or something. Because (a) there’s nothing to be jealous about…”

“Well, not precisely nothing.”

“Nothing to be jealous about, and (2)—”

“(b).”

“Right, (b), I’m not to be fucked with.”

“What does that mean?”

“Let’s hope roosalsa doesn’t find out.”

“Rusalka. As in ‘a rusalka.’ Plural rusalki. And her name is Nadia.”

“Cute. I used to name my fish, too.”

“Do me a favor and don’t ever confront her. Or threaten her.”

“What am I supposed to do if she’s creeping around on my land?”

“Just. I’ll…”

“Talk to her, I know.”

“Just don’t go near the water if she’s around. Don’t let her talk you into going near the water. If you’re scared, turn on your oven. She hates dry heat.”

He’s looking at her with serious-Andrew face on.

“Is she dangerous?”

Andrew doesn’t say anything.

11

“It’s just that I was swimming and I heard Russian. I could not resist. I love to speak Russian,” Nadia says.

The next day.

Andrew’s house.

“What did you do with him?”

“I took him to the ship, of course, with the others.”

The man rolls his long, dark hair into a bun and fixes it in place with a two-pronged little cherrywood fork, samurai-style.

“I thought you agreed only to do that farther away.”

She nods gravely, playing with the three-tiered necklace of shells, to which she has added the dog’s tag.

Help me get home!

“It is June, you know,” she says. Andrew knows she’s referring to the festival of Rusal’naya, when her sisters dance in the fields and on the roads from Poland to the Urals, luring young men to watery deaths. “I cannot assist myself.”

“Help myself, you mean. And the Russian thing is no excuse. I speak Russian. You should speak it with me.”

“No,” she corrects, holding up a pale finger, “you read Russian. When you force it out from your mouth, it goes unwillingly. Stinking of Ohio.”

He smiles at her Slavic palatalization of the h.

“What do you know about Ohio?”

“I know Geneva on the Lake. I know Erie.”

“That’s Pennsylvania.”

“Is the same.”

He gets up from his couch and goes to the window that gives on the lake, turning his back to her, his shoulders hard and angular as though the antique Japanese robe he wears were hung on a block of tilted wood. She can’t see his face but knows he is smiling at the darkness on the horizon. A storm is coming, and he likes storms, especially these nasty little June squalls that form so quickly they shame the weathermen. It will come ashore within the hour, bringing Canadian air with it, and he will put on his leather coat and go out to the balcony.

The coat with the cigarettes in the pocket.

“Is not the same,” he says, mocking her accent.

“Give me a cigarette,” she says.

“You know where they are.”

“I know. I just wanted to see if you had become a gentleman yet. But you are still from Ohio.”

She gets up and feels around in the pocket of the leather bomber jacket hanging near the door, pulling his yellow packet of American Spirits out and tamping it against her hand to pack the tobacco. Never mind that he has already done this. She redoes everything he does to show that it might be done better. She pulls one out and lights it, frowning at it as though even she cannot believe that something living (or existing, if you prefer) at the bottom of a lake might need tobacco.

“I feel your… disapproval,” she says. “You have something else to say?”

“You know what I would say.”

“That you hate it when I drown them.”

“To which you will reply that nothing makes you come as hard as drowning someone, and that you’ll come like that for a month afterward. Besides, it’s in your nature.”

“And you will say go to Oswego to do that. Or Rochester. Or Canada.”

“But Canada is so faaaar to svim, and I vill miss you,” he says, imitating her again. He takes the cigarette from her mouth and puffs it, ignoring the fishy, dead taste, as he has learned so well to do in other situations. She takes the cigarette back and reaches for the spray bottle full of lake water, misting her dreadlocked auburn mane until it drips.

“Then you will ask,” she continues, spearing each of the next words with the end of her cigarette as she enunciates them, “What. Did. You. Do. With. The. Dog?”

“You didn’t eat the poor thing.”

“I wanted to. He was old, but plump and spoiled with good meat on his thighs. But I knew you would be upset.”

“So you ate him and resolved to lie to me about it.”

“I cannot lie to you.”

“You cannot lie to me and get away with it.”

“Is same thing.”

“Is not same thing. Is question of intent.”

“I left him where he was. The door was open. He can stay, he can go, is up to him. Someone will find him. Maybe you? You want an old shitty dog?”

“Salvador wouldn’t like that.”

“No,” she agrees.

He lights his own Spirit and inhales deeply, exhales slowly, mouth closed, eyes closed, letting the smoke come out of his nose in a luxurious rush.

Poison.

Everything I enjoy is connected to death.

“Did you ever get the feeling that something bad has happened, something just outside your control, and perhaps outside your understanding, which will set in motion a series of events that will lead to deep tragedy? And great loss.”

She considers this. Draws smoke with difficulty because she has wet the filter. Lets it out of her nose, as he did.

“Yes.”

12

As if summoned, Salvador walks downstairs carrying the soaked and reeking bedsheets from the master bedroom toward the laundry room in the basement. If the framed portrait of Salvador Dalí that served as his head could bear any expression other than the self-consciously crazed eyes of the surrealist, the stick-and-wicker man might raise an eyebrow. He loves to hear his name.

As it is, he swivels his painted gaze at them on his way down, hoping to be called over, but, when he isn’t, continues dutifully down the steps on his military-grade prosthetic legs.

Once in the basement, it is all Salvador can do not to spread the sheets out and roll in them; the basket at the center of him holds the salted heart of the border collie he had been before the magus revived him in this form, and that heart still gladdens at strong smells, particularly fishy or fecal ones. He inclines his flat portrait head toward the armful of bedclothes, reveling in their filth. It will be criminal to wash these delicious odors away, but he loves his master as only dogs love, and he sighs a canine sigh and opens the door of the washing machine.

13

The Jehovah’s Witnesses come soon after the storm is over. The air is damp and the receding dark clouds in the east make their white shirts pop as they walk up the drive between the young maple trees. Andrew stands on his front porch with his leather coat on, knowing he looks and smells every inch the career sinner, combing out waist-length hair redolent of tobacco and myrrh. He frowns at a new white hair, plucks it, winds it around a finger.

It will take them a moment to make it up the steep walk.

He realizes he is about to sigh, recognizes impatience as a sign of entitlement, thinks he really should read another book about Buddhism and try to meditate. He has a date with being Buddhist, but he isn’t there yet.

And here come two of God’s warriors, both of them African American, one in his sixties, one about twenty.

At least they mean it, I’ll give them that. They wear out a lot of shoe leather doing what Jesus said to do. No Christmas. No Halloween. But this is a little like trick-or-treating. Do they eat candy? Do I even have any candy?

The older one is slowing them down.

That guy doesn’t need any candy.

That wasn’t very Buddhist, and he’s not fat, just a little soft around the middle, and probably a grandfather, so give him a break.

Maybe that kid’s grandfather?

The elder raises a hand, smiles a winning smile.

“Quite a driveway you have here,” he says. “You must be in good shape!”

“I might be if I ever left. I’m a hermit. All I do up here is talk to God and wait for strangers to come so I can tell them God’s plan for them. Didn’t they warn you about me at the Kingdom Hall?”

“Well, they did say…”

“Where’s Barbara?”

“She moved to Syracuse.”

“More action in the big city. A rich crop of the godless there, I tell you.”

“Something like that.”

He stands with his hands on his hips, bent forward just a little, his elbows fanning out his open coat, Sears, granddad gray. Tie the color of an excited brick. He’s smiling and panting, catching his breath.

“You okay?” Andrew says.

He nods, still panting.

The younger Witness senses he should say something, but he’s a shy one. He’s also more than a little distracted by the garden of rocks and rusted-out cars piled in Andrew’s front yard. The ’65 Mustang he wrecked, an old Chevy truck, a Dodge Dart. All of them wound through with young trees and big, handsome boulders. Its aesthetic leans just more toward art installation than junkyard fodder.

The boy is fascinated with it, especially the bleached longhorn steer skull crowning it all, its dry teeth yellowing in their sockets, its horns leather-wrapped at the base, slightly tilted.

The lad knows there’s something more to it than meets the eye.

He knows he’s the one who’s supposed to break the silence, though, so he speaks.

“Quite a… quite a storm, wasn’t it?”

“Sure was,” Andrew says.

They exchange a look.

The boy glances at the steer skull again, then tilts his head a little bit at the magus, like a dog trying to process a strange sound.

Holy shit, is this kid luminous?

A natural?

Andrew smiles more broadly.

Damn if he isn’t. Marching around with armfuls of The Watchtower when he’s just humming with receptivity for magic. Anneke’s got a little, but this kid’s like I was.

Ready to explode.

One spell book away from a lifetime of…

What?

Now the older man stands.

“Arthur. Arthur Madden,” he says, holding out a hand. “And this handsome fellow is Marcus Madden, Jr. No relation. Just kidding.”

“Andrew Blankenship.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Blankenship.”

This is a genuinely nice guy. I’ll keep it dialed down.

It’s hard to keep the mischief out of his voice.

“Would you like to come in?”

They leave twenty minutes later.

It isn’t the conversation about the reliability of the gospels, nor is it Andrew’s Socratic minefield of questions; it isn’t even Andrew’s assertion that a God who intended sex for procreation alone would not have built a clitoris, nor made it so compatible with the tongue. (“Must be nice to be so close to the lake,” Arthur says to change the subject, although Andrew enjoys the unintended symbolism, as he enjoys that this is how faultlessly polite Arthur chooses to comment about the fishy smell permeating the house.)

It’s Marcus.

Marcus sees too much.

First he’s distracted, looking out at the lake through the back windows.

“Is there something more interesting than us out there, young man?”

“I… thought I saw a… dolphin.”

“Lakes don’t have dolphins,” Arthur says.

“We have some very big fish,” Andrew offers.

The kid looks at him dubiously.

“Very big,” Andrew says.

They return to the topic of whether homosexuality is a sin or a natural state of being. Marcus always lets Arthur (his great-uncle, as it turns out) field the questions, but Andrew drags him in from time to time.

“C’mon, Marcus—you’ve seen gay kids.”

Marcus almost laughs at that and Arthur steers the conversation back around to God’s capacity for forgiveness, clearly meaning Andrew.

Offers of Witness literature are countered with offers of Buddhist, Taoist, or Confucian books.

Mutual refusal.

“Or, if you want to come back another time, I’ve got a reference library that might really interest you.”

He directs this at Marcus, trying not to sound creepy, and failing.

When Salvador brings Andrew French-press coffee, the young man goes gray, looks at Arthur, watches Arthur nod at the servant, and doesn’t understand why Arthur isn’t shitting himself, too.

That’s because Arthur sees a young Spanish man who bears a slight resemblance to John Leguizamo. You, on the other hand, see the false human form flicker from time to time, and that’s when you see the lacquered branches that make his radius and ulna, the awkward but delicate way his artist’s-model articulated hands pluck a spoon from the tray or press down the plunger of the coffee press. You glimpse the steam wafting over the portrait. You see ghosts, too, and hear voices. You think you’re crazy sometimes and sometimes you think you’re possessed. But really you’re just awake.

How unlucky.

“I want to go, Uncle.”

Arthur raises an eyebrow at the boy, suggesting that a conversation about manners will take place on the drive back, but then he checks his watch, a big seventies-style Timex on a silver watchband.

Salvador offers them both coffee.

Arthur politely declines.

Half-turns his wrist to check his watch again.

Andrew realizes Arthur has no cell phone and loves him for it.

Marcus stares, suddenly peaceful, as though resigned to the mental breakdown he thinks he’s having.

“Well, I guess Mrs. Simpson will be bringing the car around soon, and we’d best not keep her waiting. Thank you for your hospitality, Mr. Blankenship.”

“Thank you for the conversation.”

All three men rise.

Salvador is standing between them and the front door, so Marcus steals for the side door leading from the kitchen.

“Oh, no!” Andrew says. “The stairs over there are dangerous. It’s better if you go out the way you came.”

Salvador moves aside, bowing slightly.

This is my house, and you must exit the same way you entered.

“Remember what I said about the library,” he tells Marcus. “It might explain things a bit.”

“Thank you,” Marcus says quietly, but he just wants out.

His eyes don’t meet Andrew’s again.

It is all he can do not to race ahead of his ponderous uncle, race down the wooded drive and into the heated SUV where Mrs. Simpson hums along with 1950s music on the radio and Jesus and the angels still hold fast against the devil’s wicked, confusing world.

14

Andrew lights the oil lamps on the big pine farm table that sits in the middle of his library while Salvador hovers near; the magus never lets the wicker man, whose wooden left hand is newer and paler than the right one, handle fire.

The servant writes on the Etch-a-Sketch around his neck, turning the knobs with his clever fingers, his wicker hips moving gently with the ghost of his wagging tail.

“Wine,” Andrew says, and Salvador turns his portrait gaze toward the hall, starting off in that direction; then he seems to remember something important—he shudders, making a sound like a dry whimper and shaking his flat head. He clasps his hands in supplication and stares at Andrew now, still huskily whining.

“I know, boy. That was mean. I was just testing. Fizzy water will do.”

The automaton visibly relaxes and hurries out of the library. Andrew goes to the hanging shelf, a weathered blue bookcase suspended close to the high ceiling by belts, just out of reach, a baby doll with wild hair and no eyes hanging from a shoestring noose nailed to its bottom. An Indian-print blanket veils the volumes waiting within. Andrew stands close to the doll and says, “Hello, Sally. I declare myself to be Andrew Ranulf Blankenship, son of George Blankenship, grandson of Charles Thaddeus Blankenship, and I am the true owner of this house and these books.”

The doll kicks her feet now to start herself gently swinging. After three swings’ worth of momentum, she latches onto Andrew’s hair with one of her plastic hands. She feels his face with her other hand and, satisfied, kisses his cheek and goes inanimate again, swinging limply from the bottom of the shelf. The belts that hold the shelf loosen themselves now and it lowers so he can reach within. He pulls aside the curtain. The power drill that would have lashed out and blinded anyone but Andrew whirrs once to show it’s on duty. The drill sits on the bottom of two levels, next to a rubber cobra and a mummified fist wearing brass knuckles (this Hand of Glory doesn’t pick locks or light candles or stop hearts—it belonged to a Cossack pugilist hanged for beating his wife’s lover and that man’s two brothers to death). On the top level, nine identical-looking huge leather books lie stacked in threes, bindings out. The magus eases his fingers around the second book in the rightmost pile and slides it out from under its top neighbor, which lifts itself up obligingly. Each of the eight decoys holds a nasty surprise for anyone, Andrew included, who begins to pull it out; the book below the actual book, for example, contains several dozen dried, wormlike Amazonian parasites, normally river dwellers, that will slither under the clothes of any intruders and race for the urethra, fighting each other, if necessary, for the honor of burrowing within and affixing themselves in front of the bladder with backward-facing spines. Only a blessing from the shaman of a nearly extinct tribe administered in the actual Amazon would make the thing let go, but this has to happen within a week or the beast will catch fire. Not as immediate as the shotgun shells (once owned by Doc Holliday) that wait in book two, but any spell-caster (and who else would have gotten this far?) will have trouble concentrating on anything above the waist while the wigglers do their wiggly work.

He cradles the book and sets it on the table, now pulling a dictionary of Old Russian from a more ordinary shelf behind him, fetching a spiral notebook and pencils, and sitting down to read. Of the four books he brought home from forests near the Volga (each with its own shelf and booby traps), this is one of the two he understands least.

After The Book of Sorrows, that is.

But this one.

He knows, as well, that it is the most precious book he owns, and that any magus who becomes aware of its existence will stop at nothing to get it. It is said that Rasputin was protected by some of the lesser spells held within, and that Koschey the Deathless mastered the whole thing before the crone extorted it from him in the time of the Tsar Alexander II.

So far, Andrew has come to understand parts of it but is afraid to try anything beyond a sort of dream-walking wherein he sends his consciousness, still well tethered to his sleeping body, to roam the beaches of the lake or through walls into the homes of his neighbors.

He gave this last bit up after observing his misanthropic survivalist neighbor John Dawes (across Willow Fork Road, binocular distance) drunkenly shaving his scrotum with a straight razor while watching a Gilligan’s Island rerun. The sight had so startled Andrew that he experienced a sort of spasm and suspects he nearly snapped his tether. He has seen nothing yet to convince him that an actual hell exists (or that it does not), but leaving his body comatose while his soul haunts the house of a lonely, gun-happy ball-shaver sounds close enough. Now he confines his experiments to beachcombing and low-altitude flight, never straying more than a mile or two away from himself; he intends to push himself further if he can understand how to get back into himself without the comforting astral umbilicus that anchors him. Getting back into your own body without it is the first step. Next and harder will be taking over another body, which is a fearful business that smacks of actual evil. Temporary possession is possible, but the language in Of the Soul warns that stuffing two souls in one body is draining to both: The original host might succeed in pushing you out and into death’s embrace; if not, the presence of multiple souls in one body attracts “other beings,”

Sign off, Ichthus70

whose company might be undesirable. Permanent occupation is, of course, murder.

And yet, one might use this to live indefinitely, practicing a sort of biological alchemy, transmuting the lead of aging and sick bodies into the gold of healthy, young ones. One might live on in beauty and strength for centuries.

Andrew strongly suspects some are doing this now.

He often muses that if he were to walk into a room full of those who actually run the world, the invisibles that heads of state and oil barons take their marching orders from, it would look like the audition room for a TV soap opera: They would all be lovely; they would all look twenty-five to forty, and whether this was accomplished by the witchcraft of science or the science of witchcraft would be even money. Those who trade in magic value money less than others, true, because they can always manufacture, steal, win, or conjure it as needed; most really powerful conjurers regard those who hoard money as nothing but glorified squirrels saving for a winter they will never live to see. But when you stack enough zeroes behind an integer, enough, say, to bribe a prime minister or buy a vast old-growth forest, even a sorcerer won’t ignore it; a handful of people may well be buying their way into extended youth.

“But not eternal youth,” Andrew says at half voice.

Nothing is forever.

A memory makes him almost smile, and he shakes it off, turning his mind to the problem of the tether.

Now Salvador walks into the room and pours Gerolsteiner water from a clay pitcher (one of Anneke’s) into Andrew’s glass, hoping to receive another command, but resigning himself to being ignored—his master has inclined his head to study, and, although the days are past when the dry man with the dog’s heart has to clear two empty wine bottles from the table and cork a third before pulling his sodden master to bed by the heels, it will be nearly dawn before the magus shuts his book.

15

“Get that pinché thing away from me,” Chancho says.

Ten A.M., time for training.

Chancho has taken the morning off from the North Star Garage, which is his prerogative since he owns it. Todd, Rick, and Gonzo, his three employees who vary so much in height they could be a totem pole, will handle things at a slower pace in his absence, but they will still get the work done well, and God help them if they fart around and charge for the farting-around time. Chancho wants his customers to tell all their friends how cheap repairs are at North Star, how fast the work gets done, how polite the mechanics are. Gonzo, six and a half feet tall but so thin he looks like he stepped out of an El Greco, handles the counter and the phone—he wears his hair long and has a shitty goatee he used to wear a rubber band around

Why the f do you wear that thing in your beard?

You can say fuck to me, I won’t be offended.

I don’t say fuck no more.

You just did.

Why do you wear it?

I dunno.

Then stop. I won’t make you cut the beard, even though it makes you look like a pimp, but that rubber band got to go. Put it around some money.

I don’t have any.

That’s because you put it in the pinché bank. Banks are full of robbers. Put rubber bands around that shit and bury it.

Why is it okay to say shit but not fuck?

…

I need to think about this.

but Gonzo has a voice like wildflower honey pouring winter-slow from a jar, and eyes like Paul Newman.

Everybody likes Gonzo.

The people of Cayuga County are still a little on the xenophobic side, and the Mexican invasion is only just beginning to lap at the ankles of upstate New York, so bearish, tattooed Chancho doesn’t want his brown face to be the first one they see at North Star.

He doesn’t need their love.

Just their business.

When it comes to love, he gets all he needs from his wife and Jésus Christ. Consuela got fat, but Jésus stayed skinny; he would have preferred the reverse, since he only has to chingar Consuela, but her face is still pretty and he remembers how her body was in Mexico and Texas. Maybe she does the same for him—he’s got a bigger belly now, too, and fair is fair.

“No, seriously, brujo, get this cabrón away from me. He gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

Salvador stands with two bottles of mineral water balanced on a tray, his hips barely moving in the echo of a wagging tail. Salvador remembers the big man with his smell of motor oil and cumin from his four-legged days. Chancho used to throw the Frisbee for him, and praise him for how high he jumped, and scratch his ears. His master explained to him that Chancho is afraid of him now, but that he shouldn’t take that personally.

Salvador really wants Chancho to like him again.

He moves a little closer with the tray.

Chancho squints, takes his mineral water, crosses himself.

16

Minutes later.

Chancho holds the striking pads for Andrew and begins to call off punches.

“Jab. Jab. Right cross. Jab. Jab. Double jab. Left hook.”

Chancho calls these words at the outer limit of audibility, as gently as if he were inventorying flowers at a funeral parlor.

“Now move forward with me,” he says, lets Andrew push him across the yard. He no longer calls punches, just holds the pads up and lets his friend improvise.

“Now punch while backing up. This is very important. You can knock a guy out who thinks he has you.”

Chancho moves forward slowly but insistently, alternating pads, nodding when Andrew lands an especially crisp one.

The taped-up gloves tattoo the taped-up pads in the backyard, the staccato mixing pleasantly with birdsong and a tractor straddling asphalt and dirt on the road out front.

“Don’t puss out on me,” Chancho says, now gently boxing out at Andrew’s ears with the mitts to show him he’s letting his guard droop.

“Switch,” he says, and Andrew takes the mitts, preparing himself for the barely padded brickstorm he will now be fielding. He’s glad for the rest all the same; his drills have left him wheezing.

The staccato comes faster and harder now, the bigger man pushing the lanky one back, bobbing his head and shoulders like something between an angry chimp and a piston. Chancho had been a formidable boxer fifteen years ago, and might have gone professional had he not been so fond of beer—he had never etched a boxer’s six-pack into his belly. The obvious way to beat Chancho was to wear him out, and enough of them did to keep him from quitting his day job.

But many did not; to wear Chancho out, you had to be able to duck his bear-swat punches, which was hard, or absorb them, which was damn near impossible.

And you had to not smoke a pack a day.

“Okay, enough punching.”

“Thank the gods.”

“Now elbows,” Chancho all but whispers, smiling his big smile under the uneven, dated mustache, just going gray. Only the soul patch under his chin keeps him from looking like he stepped out of a Starsky and Hutch episode.

Chancho throws elbows first, so the magus can rest his lungs a bit more. The tattooed arms lash out and bite the pads deep, the left elbow flashing the star tattoo of Texas, where the burly man lived until he found Jésus and got out of moving drugs. Or, rather, protecting people who moved drugs.

Chancho would always be the first guy you’d want to meet in the ring and the last guy you’d want to meet in the parking lot. Or see coming up to your sliding glass door with a lucha libre mask on.

Andrew is feeling dizzy with exhaustion, but Chancho wants him to push through it, so he does, the sweat drenching his long hair even in its ponytail, making his bare chest glisten and soaking the waistband of his jeans.

“Now you. Twist at the hips so I feel it. You’re little, so it’s even more important for you to get your hips in it. I want twenty on each side.”

When the drenched and reeking pads are lying on the table and the panting men sit down on their benches, Salvador walks from the back door carrying Mexican Coca-Cola bottles on a tray.

“Good boy,” Andrew says. “Thank you.”

Six years now since he used his secret books to bring the dog back. Chancho watches Salvador with a fixed eye; looking away from the clockwork figure is difficult, especially when he swivels his Dalí head around to meet your gaze. The thing moves so… fluidly.

Chancho likes Mexican Coke because it’s in glass bottles and has sugar, not that corn syrup crap they drench everything in now.

He likes it so much he doesn’t cross himself when he takes the bottle from the stick-man.

Instead he turns his gaze on Andrew.

“You’ve got to quit smoking.”

Andrew, who knows how green he looks, just nods, sipping his cola.

“I know. But isn’t that pretty pot-kettle? You smoke.”

The sweat on the green bottles looks heavenly to Chancho and he studies his, pressing it now to the side of his temple.

“I know.”

“You smoke my cigarettes, for fuck’s sake.”

“Your cigarettes are good.”

“So buy some. They’ll sell ’em to you.”

“Got to go to the hippie shop for that.”

“I’m just saying a smoker ought not tell a man to quit.”

“I don’t wheeze like a busted vacuum. I ought to quit. You got to quit.”

“Maybe.”

“Ain’t there a pinché spell for that?”

“Yeah. It’s right next to the one for quitting drinking.”

Chancho smiles.

“Maybe we could get you a hip’motist.”

“Ever seen one?”

“Heard about ’em.”

“Well, they scare me fuckless,” Andrew says. “I saw one make a guy think he came all over himself right at a café table, so that when the waitress came the guy pulled the tablecloth half off trying to cover up his lap.”

Chancho laughs, broadly enough to show the gap where the tooth behind the canine should have been.

“Funny. A man scaring you. Just a man, I mean. When you play with dead girls and dead dogs and stuff. That fishy girl, you said she kilt herself, right?”

“Her sister stole her man and she threw herself off the bluffs.”

“McIntyre Bluffs?” Chancho asked.

Andrew nodded.

“’Cause I know a guy took his lady there and they both fell off f’ing. Only nobody died. But he got his back broke, but could still walk. I think she landed on him.”

“Nadia died. Broke that pretty neck back in 1926.”

Chancho squints at him and tilts his head up, assessing.

“You need to get right with Jésus.”

“I’m fine with Jésus.”

Silence.

“Can I drive the Mustang?”

“If you shut up about Jésus.”

Chancho smiles.

17

Years ago.

Night.

Another Mustang, the ’65.

Upside down, wheels spinning, engine running. Andrew uncomfortable, scratched, confused. Can’t reach the keys to shut the motor off because there’s a branch in the way. Led Zeppelin is singing about California but it sounds wrong because only one speaker works.

He climbs out into cool spring air, smelling radiator fluid and oil.

Nearly falls; something is wrong with his leg.

The peasants! The peasants cut my leg off!

He looks down, but his leg is there.

Mostly.

His jeans are ripped and lots of little somethings hurt, far away.

His heart is pounding.

Just breathe.

Just walk.

Andrew walks, his back to the lamplit greenery and spinning wheels of the wrecked Mustang.

Ford.

First on Race Day!

(F)ucked (OR) (D)ying.

Andrew in his snakeskin boots and tight black jeans, walking down 104A, tempted to stop at a house but senses he’s done something wrong; he needs to get back to his own house and Sarah. He’ll be safe there; he’ll sleep and he’ll know what to do in the morning.

The left leg hurts; he sits on a guardrail and pulls his boot off, pours blood out of it, it won’t go back on.

He holds it and keeps limping, waving off several cars that stop, actually yells at one big, Swedish-looking fellow who insists that he should get in his pickup truck, but he won’t go away. Looks like he means to wrestle him into the truck. Until Andrew points at the big man’s face and gives him a cramp in the cheek muscles

How Prospero of you oh that wasn’t nice he just wants to help but I have to have to just please God get home

and the big man drives off, scared because he knows the wild, injured little man did it to him. Andrew doesn’t understand how mud got on him, but mud is drying in his hair and on his face and he pulls at this, spits on his hand and wipes his cheek.

The boot swinging in the other hand, the magus limping.

Only ten miles to Dog Neck Harbor, should be there by morning.

He waves off two more cars, but the third one pulls in front of him, its roof exploding in sharp but beautiful flashes of blue light.

Andrew says some words in medieval Russian.

Andrew disappears.

Knows the spell won’t last, hobbles into a soy field.

Invisible.

I don’t drive so well but I’m not too drunk to fucking DISAPPEAR!

He curls up in the soy plants, feels something like a beetle crawl on his hand but doesn’t slap at it.

Says “I pardon you” in a German accent like Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List and laughs until he passes out.

Dreams his car is radioactive, luminous with it, enough to poison Cayuga County, that he has to shovel enough dirt over it to protect everybody, but he can’t. He just can’t. And he holds his shovel and cries. Because he really, really fucked up.

In the morning, a trio of dogs sniffing him, a man’s good, lined face, a giant looking down on him.

Fu fu fu, I smell Russian bones.

“Ambulance is on its way. You want some water?”

He does.

O God I fucked up I did.

He did.

More than he knows.

He sits up.

He reaches into his pocket, thinking something in there will help him.

A napkin with a note on it, a semicircle of cabernet from where the glass rested on it, a crescent moon of vice and folly.

When did she slip that into his pocket?

Is it even from today?

Sarah.

“Sit up slow. No hurry.”

The farmer again.

He shows the farmer the napkin note.

“Do you know when this was written?”

The farmer shakes his head.

“A pretty girl wrote it. She writes grant applications. And they say she plays guitar. And laughs and sings.”

The man smiles, points at the ambulance, walks off to talk to them, leaves a jug with a thumbprint of red paint on it.

Andrew notices the bright red silo.

Nice work, mister.

The water tastes like plastic.

And dirt.

Dirt in my mouth.

La la la la.

18

“Whatcha thinking about, brujo?”

“My personal bottom.”

“Bang!” Chancho says, swerving the wheel just a little, grinning.

The Mustang is doing seventy on a two-lane country highway.

Andrew jerks, grabs the door.

“Whoever told you you were funny was a pendejo.”

Chancho corrects his pronunciation.

19

Andrew wears his hair in a ponytail to do yard work at the Zautke house because he feels too effeminate in his samurai bun. He walks behind the power mower trying to look like he knows what he’s doing, working his way from the curb to the nondescript blue house, circumnavigating the stone birdbath, jogging it past the flagpole, but Salvador has been mowing Andrew’s yard for the last few years, and Andrew’s feet aren’t practiced at taking the turns. He leaves hand-sized patches of taller grass and then has to double back for them; he looks at the shorn front half of the yard and it strikes him funny because it looks just a bit like Karl’s squared-off old-man crew cut.

Karl watches him from the porch for a second.

Wants to shout “Need anything?” at his daughter’s strange AA friend, but knows he’s on the wagon like Anneke and all Karl has that isn’t beer is cheap Pick & Save orange juice just this side of brown or tap water just this side of clear, water that tastes like… what the hell does the water here taste like?

Not water.

Goddamn Niagara Mohawk anyway.

Karl Zautke hasn’t been feeling well lately, his lymph glands swollen up like acorns, his breath short. Not bad enough to go to the hospital, but bad enough that Anneke is coming every other day now instead of twice a week.

She does his dishes, cooks two days’ worth of food for him, does his sour laundry.

But does he even try to take care of his flagging health?

Karl drinks his Pabst Blue Ribbon, enjoying the yeasty, cold, carbonated bite on his tongue. It’s a good, simple beer for when you’re thirsty, not one of these perfumey, pumpernickel microbrews queered up by guys with sideburns.

Anneke has her big suede work gloves on, balanced on an aluminum ladder that has seen better days, shearing branches from the maple tree that had started flirting with the shingles on the west side of the house. She totters just a little, rights herself. Karl sees this, puts down his beer, comes over, and holds the ladder.

“Daddy,” she shouts, just loud enough to get over the mower’s chop. She points her gloved finger at the front door, meaning he should retake his place on his sagging chair, but Karl holds the ladder stubbornly, breathing hard through his nose and smiling at her. She doesn’t like how red his face is.

It does feel steadier.

If Karl Ernest Zautke is anything, it’s solid.

They sit on the porch, the three of them, Karl mopping his head from time to time with a kitchen towel. Karl Zautke is just a little too big for the wicker chair beneath him; Andrew has been watching it collapse in slow motion for a year and a half. Anneke would get him a new one except that she knows Karl finds half-collapsed things comfortable.

Dad.

My same Dad but old now.

Sick.

Doesn’t drink like he’s sick.

Dad’s on his third beer, and Anneke has told herself she’ll just pluck from his hand the next one he dares to open in front of her.

Karl senses he’s on the last beer he can get away with and knows better than to test her. Settles into his buckling throne.

Andrew feels mismatched sitting on his folding chair, sharing the porch with the two outsized Teutons, like a visitor from a fine-boned, nut-brown little tribe that mows the conqueror’s lawns and fetches them PBR against their doctors’ orders.

Anneke and he can’t share their vulgar wiseasseries in front of Karl, so Andrew confines himself to the practical.

Karl doesn’t feel comfortable talking about his illness or the day-to-day problems it creates in front of Andrew. Anneke enjoys having her favorite men together, and if they don’t know how to connect, that’s their problem.

“Car running okay?” Andrew asks.

Karl drives a Jeep Cherokee Andrew has bewitched to keep from breaking down, and has further bewitched so it will come to a safe stop if the driver passes out. Andrew has a real gift for cars, knows how to improvise automotive magic, massage it into their axles and chassis, synthesize it into their gears and skins. He knows very well the Jeep is running smoothly, but he never knows what to say to the big ex-sailor.

“Yeah, great,” Karl says. “Thanks again for changing her oil.”

“My pleasure.”

Two heartbeats go by.

“Mustang running all right?” Karl says, nodding at Andrew’s car.

“Yes, sir.”

“Sure is a nice one.”

“Thanks.”

“Turquoise was an interesting choice.”

“That’s how she came.”

“Paint jobs are pricey.”

“They can be.”

Two more heartbeats.

“You need any juice or maybe a glass of water? Must be thirsty. Hot as heck out here.”

It really isn’t all that hot.

“Water would be great.”

Both men start to get up, but Anneke gently puts her hand on her dad’s shoulder so he keeps his seat.

She goes to get the water.

“So,” Karl says, looking back at the door to make sure Anneke isn’t coming yet. He’s winding up to ask something awkward, and Andrew’s skin crawls.

How does he make me feel twelve and tongue-tied?

“Yes, sir?”

Again with the sir.

This kid doesn’t sir anybody else, I’d bet on it.

Knows I served and wants me to like him.

Kid hell, he’s like forty, just wears his hair long so he looks like Pocahontas. Probably puts shoe polish in it.

Probably uses moisturizer and plucks his eyebrows, too.

Goes down to the day spa in Syracuse.

I can see this guy getting a pedicure.

I want to like him, I do.

Anneke sure spends enough time with him.

Guy and a girl don’t spend that kind a time together without.

Is he?

I kinda hope he is.

“Are you and Anneke…?”

“Sir?”

There’s no way in hell.

A guy like this.

Unless she likes him ’cause he looks a little like a girl.

I don’t even know if it works that way.

Shit, here she comes.

“Are you staying for dinner?”

Anneke hands Andrew a water glass with faded sunflowers painted on it, the last one of the eight-piece set from her childhood.

“You know we are, Dad.”

But only Anneke spends the night.

20

Night.

Andrew opens his eyes in the near-darkness of his own house, two wicks of his three-wick bedside pillar candle still alight, nearly but not quite drowned in red wax.

His paperback copy of The Baron in the Trees lies open facedown on the pillow.

Something is watching him.

He knows what.

He also knows it’s three in the morning.

That’s when it most often comes.

“Ichabod.”

The entity doesn’t respond.

“Ichabod, say something.”

“Something.”

It has chosen a little girl’s voice.

“Manifest in a form I won’t find disagreeable.”

“Ja, mein Captain,” it says.

A gently glowing Katzenjammer Kid, the blond one, appears, sitting on Andrew’s leather chair, its legs primly crossed at the knee. While Andrew appreciates the novelty of seeing the little German cartoon boy in 3-D, it is mildly disturbing. Perhaps a cat’s whisker shy of being disagreeable.

Ichabod has a sniper’s precision when it comes to causing unease.

Ichabod isn’t its name, of course, but then neither was the long Sumerian name whose first three syllables sounded vaguely like Ichabod.

“Did you touch my foot?”

“Just playing little piggies.”

“I don’t like that.”

“It seemed the gentlest way to wake you.”

“Don’t do it again.”

“Is that a command?”

“Yes. Are you going to insist on protocol?”

“Not this time. It seems a modest enough request. Note to myself: no touching Master Andrew’s sleeping piggies. Check. Anything else?”

Andrew sits up, gathering the sheet around him.

“Tell me why you’re here.”

“What, here?” it says, and now the Katzenjammer Kid is sitting in bed next to Andrew, hands on lap, looking like a child who wants to be read a story. It gives off cold like a ham just out of the freezer. It has chosen to be heavy—it depresses the bed.

Andrew forces himself not to recoil.

“Go back to the chair and remain there until I dismiss you.”

It blinks its big cartoon eyes twice.

Andrew draws a breath to begin the formal command, but Ichabod winks out and winks back in on the leather chair, sitting lotus-style.

“Well?”

“Well what?” it says in an incongruously masculine bass.

“Tell me why you’re here.”

“Can’t I just visit? I get lonely in my lair. There’s not a great deal to do there.”

“Then go back where you came from.”

“And miss the rest of your life? I wouldn’t dream of it.”

Andrew sighs anxiously.

It speaks again, using its fallback voice, petulant intellectual.

“I’m worried about you, Captain. Master. Master Andrew Commander.”

“Tell me why.”

“You know why.”

“I don’t.”

“It’s time.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Only because you don’t want to know. But you need to know.”

“Just say what you have to say and go.”

“You might have let me destroy your rusalka. When I offered.”

“I don’t want her destroyed.”

“But now it’s too late.”

“For what?”

“That Russian she drowned was an extraordinary specimen.”

“Fucking tell me.”

At Andrew’s flash of anger, the cartoon child flushes red as though someone had poured blood into it and begins to flicker.

Becomes a writhing squid for a split second, then reverts to Katzenjammer Kid.

“Some people see God’s hand in coincidence. Are you one of these?”

Andrew seethes.

“Just…”

It cuts him off.

“Ask your rusalka for the dog’s collar.”

“Why?”

“You will want to research its owner.”

21

“There are two kinds of users,” Andrew tells Anneke. “Plodders and intuitives. Also called disciples and heirs.”

Anneke is walking a penny around in the palm of her hand. Moving small objects is almost always how it starts; Andrew has told her she has to find something she can move and move it three times a day for at least ten minutes.

She favors the penny.

They are sitting in her inside studio, the one she uses when the weather won’t allow work al fresco. Today, through the sliding glass door, it rains in indecisive spits and sputters, bedewing the greenery outside, greenery all the more dazzling when overtopped by gray.

All manner of pottery in various stages of completion crowds Anneke’s little workshop; ten whitish-gray mugs rest upside down on a board over a plastic tub of clay. Cedar Heights clay, to be exact, its yellow letters emblazoned on a stack of red sacks upon which a clay-bedabbed tower of DVD cases leans, as if eager to consummate, toward the DVD player and television on high. Everything leans and balances in here. Everything is smeared, dabbed, or stippled with clay, white or red.

Her remote controls, one for TV, one for DVD player, have been wrapped in plastic, likewise clay-smudged and fingerprinted.

More inverted mugs, and a smattering of coffee cups and saucers, congregate on a card table, along with a tall vase topped by a precarious-looking round wooden board. A quarantaine of rosettes dries atop this board, the same rosettes that, when fitted with brass pins and painted Tudor red, will adorn the vests and doublets of the acting cast of the Renaissance festival to distinguish them from unpaid costumed enthusiasts. That is to say, when a drunken Landsknecht in rather convincing armor barfs on your lady fair, the lack of said rosette upon his breast will mark this as an unsanctioned event and indemnify both the festival and the troupe of professional improvisers that animate its lanes.

“Which kind am I?” she says.

Meaning plodder or intuitive.

“A bit of both, like me,” he says. “But more intuitive, I think.”

Her brow wrinkles, and although she doesn’t look away from the exercise in her palm, it’s clear she wants more explanation.

“An intuitive just does it, doesn’t need as many implements, can do small things almost immediately. Like what you’re doing. An intuitive is more luminous, must in fact be luminous from the start.”

“And a planner?”

“Plodder.”

“Plodder.”

“They hate that word. And some of them are a bit contemptful and jealous toward intuitives.”

“Sounds like you’re a bit contemptful of them. Plodder is an ugly word. What do they call themselves?”

“Disciples is the preferred term when they differentiate, but they don’t differentiate the same way. They see themselves as disciplined and those who don’t spend their lives bent over books as lazy. Thing is, they’re all geniuses. The plodders. To come at magic without luminosity, you have to be smart enough to work for Apple or IBM or crack codes for the CIA, and a few of them do. Their books are much more complex, more like rocket science; more glyphs and formulas, though one of them would say formulae. They think their way into belief, crack the code of magic and understanding with brainpower. They aren’t all luminous at the start, but they get there; they make a fire with sticks where naturals already have a fire. But the payoff is that they can do really big, astounding things. Think of it as learning a language with books and tapes versus being born in that country. Nonluminous plodders are like non-native speakers. But English was Nabokov’s second language, and he wrote Lolita. Or was it his third language? He spoke French, too.”

“Nabokov, huh? Was that a jab?”

“At who?”

She raises an eyebrow, keeps moving the shard.

“Oh, right.”

I forgot you’re a sex offender.

“Not consciously.”

Anneke is officially a witch, albeit a novice. The first time she jiggled that penny, Andrew felt the small tingle of magic waking up. She collapsed and sobbed afterward, but that was not unusual. He had a similarly emotive reaction the first time he spun a pop top. The first spell is usually some light levitation. Small magic, admittedly, a mustard seed from which some build mountains.

He leans forward just a little so the black iron conical stove behind her appears to top her head like a witch’s hat. Sandalwood incense leaks smoke behind her. He leans the other way so it appears to come from her nose.

“What are you doing?” she says, her concentration split, Abraham Lincoln dead again on dull copper in her hand.

“Sorry. Nothing.”

She tosses the penny into a broken mug full of coins, lights a cigarette, gives him one. He totters the lighter out of her hand, levitates it into his.

“Show-off. Can you light it?”

“It’s a more precise motion, takes more strength.”

“Yes, but can you?”

“Burns more gas.”

She squints her eyes at him.

“Magic burns fuel. Continuous spells burn fuel continuously. Spikes in magic use can disrupt those spells. Think of an outlet, energy surges.”

“Continuous spells? Like what?”

“Health. Youth. Luck. One well-cast luck spell in Vegas and a user can clean up. Only not in the MGM Mirage casinos—Mandalay Bay, Bellaggio, I forget the rest but I have a list—they have users working for them, kicking others out. Or worse.”

“Youth, huh? You running one of those right now, Mr. Looks Thirty-Five?”

“You should know. Try to detect it.”

She closes her eyes.

“Open them and think about what you want to know.”

Now she looks at him, really looks at him. Then she feels it, subtle as cat’s breath. The hairs on her forearms stand up just a little.

“You vain motherfucker. So you can’t flick the lighter or you’ll get liver spots?”

“I’m a bit stronger than that,” he says, and the lighter sparks, lights up, Andrew smiling with his hands behind his head. “It’s just that I have to focus more. It’s easier just to light it by hand. It’s like Skype.”

“Excuse me?”

“Skype. It’s…”

“I know what it is, what’s the relevance?”

“I used to have a crystal ball.”

“Sounds like a song title.”

He sings.

He pauses.

“Can’t think of a rhyme?”

“No.”

“Just say it.”

“It was a bit of a pain in the ass. The other person had to have a glass something-or-other with exactly the same spell cast into it, and you both had to concentrate; if you got distracted, the image faded or distorted or went away. You’re about to ask if my fishbowl rang, and it did. Really, it quivered when the other person wanted to talk, but I taped a little bell to it.”

“I was going to ask if there was a fish in it.”

“There used to be, before I enchanted it. I’m not good with fish.”

“No, you’re good with cars and dead people. And you’re intuitive, like me. Who’s a plodder?”

“I know one.”

“Powerful?”

“Scary powerful. Young, too. Lives in Lincoln Park. Chicago. And she’s working on a project for me right now.”

22

A chill runs down Andrew’s spine and he actually leans away from his computer, as if away from the memories the word Volga stirs in him.

Fu fu fu, I smell Russian bones.

He feels sweat moisten his palms. He rubs these on his pants.

Andrew blinks at the screen, rubs his chin. “Sleep with the fishes”? Was that intentional? Does she know about Nadia?

So saying, Radha appears in a box on the screen (half Iranian on her father’s side but she says Persian—pale skin, dark hair, she is a honey), showing her hands. Text nonetheless continues to scroll.

Andrew likes dares. He prints. The printer slowly whines out not text, but a photograph. Him on the toilet, pants around ankles, long hair down, reading a copy of Timber Home Living, his favorite magazine. The picture is from this morning, from the angle of the polished brass mirror over the sink. A corner of his cell phone winks on the toilet’s tank, just behind him, indicating the electronic fingerhold she used to get in. Normally brass mirrors are safe, can’t be used as gates like glass ones, but Radha is so good with electricity and currents that she was able to press the conductive metal into her service.

Radha crosses her arms and raises an eyebrow.

When she uncrosses her arms, she has six arms, Shiva-style, the hands of which she stacks on her hips defiantly, her six elbows fanned behind her, making a sort of Persian seraph of her.

23

An apartment in Kiev.

Small and dirty, littered with decades-old Western kitsch.

An Eiffel tower perfume bottle, yellowed and empty, cat hair stuck to its sides, dominates a plastic white end table hash-marked at every edge with cigarette scars.

Next to the table, and taller, stands a Babel tower of books, at the top of which a dog-eared paperback presents a redhead with arched eyebrows, her conical, late-sixties breasts like small missiles all but poking through her bikini as she guns a motorcycle beneath the Czech title, Angels of Road and Beach.

Fake German steins made in Japan stand on the floor against a peeling once-avocado wall, like very small counterrevolutionaries awaiting their firing squad.

A curling old poster, its corners peppered with tack holes, features a leering and clearly unauthorized Mickey Mouse pointing a gloved finger back at the legend ORLANDO; oranges spill from the first O, a dolphin jumps through the second. Behind the huge mouse, men and women in early-eighties hairdos, all of them soft around the edges like someone Captain Kirk is about to inseminate, laugh in a sort of twinkling, painted-in, promlike heaven. Mickey’s waist is cut off by a neobiblical invitation, Come and See, Come and See! in Russian and Ukrainian. Under this is the Sunny Skye travel agency logo atop a long-dead phone number. The top and bottom of the poster are torn and taped in the middle where the apartment dweller’s father ripped it from its thumbtacks, ripped it off of the wall of his illegal Donetsk business in 1986, just ahead of the arrival of the police.

An orange cat with white paws licks itself, ignoring the man hunched over the computer in a sun-bleached pinkish-yellow Izod polo shirt. If it could stand up and look over his shoulder, it would see him typing in English:

The man’s spine is curled like a question mark, not from an accident of birth, but from years of hunching before monitors. He leans away from the screen now, his back as close to straight as it will go, and regards his work. He is proud of the commas before and after pervert, something only an expert in English would know to do.

He smokes, still poring over his oeuvre, checking it for errors. He catches the double-effed friday, balances his cigarette on the table ledge, types jerkily, puffs and exhales. Soon he will sell “passage” on this spam to various clients, some in Ukraine, some in China, a few in Africa, who will pay him to insert their toxic URLs and launch them at Americans and Canadians by name. Like spells, but in the millions upon millions. Sperm, his sperm, racing for the ova of personal information. Credit cards will be stolen, e-mail addresses hijacked, spyware implanted, oh the lovely chaos! More importantly, oh the lovely dollars! Hard currency will appear in his several dozen false-front PayPal accounts; he will shunt this money to accounts he holds in Trinidad, St. Martin, and the Bahamas; and his retirement will grow.

He is thirty-four, means to retire at fifty.

He has been earning his own money since he was fifteen.

He will live until eighty-five, with the help of Western medicine and his retirement, thus spending thirty-five years working and thirty-five years doing whatever the fuck he wants. When he visualizes his savings, he sees a cartoon snowball of dollars growing as it rolls downhill, hitting a valley, then shrinking as it rolls uphill until it is gone, and a tiny pop is heard.

The pop of a .22 against his temple; he means to be so poor at the top of that second hill he has no choice but to shoot himself.

It must be a .22.

Small-caliber so the bullet goes in, but cannot exit, ricocheting around inside, making cabbage of his brains, destroying all feeling, all memory. Leaving just a small, bleeding hole. People who shoot themselves with powerful guns are selfish, vulgar.

Bourgeois.

Someone must clean their brains from the wall.

Cursing them and scrubbing.

The gun will be his first purchase upon retiring.

Until then, he cannot bring himself to spend any more than necessary. He is a miser of the first house, wearing everything out until it simply cannot be used, only buying things that cost so close to nothing they might as well be free.

But when he turns fifty…

… the next time I travel the countryside.

“Perfect, pervert,” he says in thickly accented English.

The cat yawns, showing fangs that are perhaps the only truly white things in the apartment, and stretches, walking the crooked back of the sofa before sitting imperiously on the arm.

Now the night breeze, cool for June even here, fingers its way beneath the window, blowing the fly-specked curtains up. The view en face consists of yet more ugly block apartments, the lights on in only a few windows, but now these rectangles of light shiver slightly, as though from heat fumes.

No heat here, though.

The room gets colder.

The cat almost hisses, remembers what happened to it the last time it did, and curls itself around its master’s feet, its tail flicking between those heels-up feet and the sooty footprints on the pink flip-flops beneath them.

Now the man turns in his chair and looks at the window.

She’s here.

He looks away quickly.

His palms grow moist.

He anticipates the sound just before he hears it.

The sound of an iron pot scraping against the cheap stucco below the sill, scraping like a rowboat against a pier.

Baba Yaga riding through the night skies of Kiev, sitting in an iron pot, pushing it with a broom.

Just like in bedtime fables.

But she really is outside.

Some part of her, anyway.

I’m nine stories up.

Yuri…

“Yes, little mother,” he manages, smoking again.

He is careful not to show his teeth when he speaks.

Put on your kerchief.

The cat shivers violently.

He pulls the sticking drawer out, pulls out a blue terry cloth hand towel. Is repulsed thinking about putting this over his eyes but does so anyway, tilting his head back, holding it in place because God help him if it falls off and he sees her.

The crunching sound as the iron pot crumbles stucco.

Is there really a pot, or do I hear one because I expect to?

A bare foot on his gritty linoleum floor.

She is in the apartment now, he knows.

Yuri, you bought the ticket?

“Yes. One ticket for Marina Yaganishna, first class. Nizhny to Moscow, Moscow to JFK, JFK to Syracuse.”

She will not want to sit next to anyone fat.

“I already looked. The seat next to her on the long flight remained unsold, so I moved a skinny man there.”

Good.

A long moment passes.

There’s something you’re not telling me.

I don’t like that.

An acrid smell as the cat pisses on the floor.

“Sorry, little mother. I… There was someone poking around my curtain. In America. Chicago, I think. Magic.”

Find out who.

Find out why.

She comes closer.

The cat jerks from below the table, sprints for the bedroom, something else moves faster than the cat, which shrieks.

Yuri dares not look.

“I… I was working on this. I wanted to have the answer before I told you.”

And this is why you spend your time on filth?

A bony finger ticks on the screen of his computer.

Hands in horses? You think this is what happens in the country? I can show you what happens in the country, but I think you will not like it.

He doesn’t know if she is reading the English on the screen or just peering into his head. He isn’t sure she can do this, but neither is he sure she cannot.

He doesn’t know what she is.

Nobody does.

He smells her scent of iron and cookfat and pepper, undercut with dried blood, mold, fear.

She smells like fear.

He presses hard on the towel over his eyes, frightened his shaking hand might betray him, that it might fall away. His urine fingers at its gateway, wants to leak out. He controls it.

He breathes through his mouth, awkwardly shielding his teeth with his lips.

She lets him stew for a moment.

Yuri…

“Yes, little mother?”

You have needle and thread in this shithole?

“Yes, little mother.”

Use it to sew the cat’s tail back on.

“Thank you, Baba.”

Somewhere in his head, she grunts.

Now the sound of a twig broom, sweeping away her footprints.

She mounts the pot, which scrapes noisily against the bricks.

The woman in the apartment next door calls through the wall.

“What have you got over there, Yuri Denisovitch, an African rhinoceros?”

Then, more quietly, he hears her exclaim, “Shit! Spiders! So many!”

Now the sound of a broom (cheap, modern) whacking at the floor, a hurried prayer.

The cat yowls miserably from his bedroom.

The breeze stops.

The room warms, if it can be called that, from cold to merely cool.

Half an hour passes before he dares remove his terry cloth blindfold.

It is soaked with sweat.

But he did not piss himself this time.

24

An older man on a wide-screened television is speaking in a broad New England dialect that recalls the unhurried pace of a dray horse. The man’s head is long and horselike, handsome even though he is in his late sixties. He looks down at a paper, then up at the viewer.

Up at Andrew.

But he doesn’t see the younger man.

Not yet.

It’s still just a tape.

“…His life actually depends on obedience to spiritual principles. If he deviates too far, the penalty is sure and swift…”

The man drops his eyes to the paper.

“Bill.”

“He sickens and finally dies.”

Andrew knows the man will look up at the camera before speaking again.

“Bill Wilson. It’s Andrew Blankenship.”

“Andrew Blank…?”

Recognition steals across the older man’s face.

The trapdoor is open.

The dead man in the grainy color home movie becomes a little blurrier. But now he is awake, aware. He pokes his horn-rimmed glasses up on his nose and squints at Andrew through the television. He is off-script now. His surroundings are frozen. The tape stops turning in its machine.

The lights in the media room are warm and reassuring, not bright, but neither dim. Andrew doesn’t know what he looks like through the television, from there. Neither does he know if he is communing with a soul or if he is somehow snatching conversation with the man in his own time.

What he does know is that the dead souls, or the encapsulated intelligences, or the shades in Hades, or whatever they are, remember him when he finds them again.

There is continuity.

“Where are you?” Bill says, squinting.

“I’m at home.”

“That’s right. You do this from your basement, right?”

“Yes.”

Bill chuckles agreeably. He is an old man in this 1964 clip Andrew got on eBay and converted to VHS from eight-millimeter. He is speaking at a meeting in a private home in Philadelphia. He largely reads from the work of the “first hundred drunks” in this piece, and Andrew has found that this point, where he talks about death, is the easiest point at which to interrupt him. The visible half of a stainless steel water pitcher gleams below Bill, but it gleams like a still photograph.

He knows the man could touch the pitcher and the condensation would bead again; a droplet would run down the side. He could wake the pitcher up. But he would see the pitcher only if Andrew told him it was there. If he asked the dead man what was around him, he would say it was blurry, or foggy, and then, very probably, cognitive dissonance would rear its head and the dead man would start to get upset. When speaking with the dead through film, it is best to keep their attention on you.

They’ve already been through this.

Bill knows he’s dead in 2012.

Andrew told him.

Bill knows, too, that Andrew is a sorcerer, but he doesn’t hold that against him. Nor does he seem to mind Andrew’s long hair and odd clothes. Bill is perhaps the least judgmental dead person with whom Andrew has spoken.

“The last time we spoke,” Bill says, “you told me you were sponsoring a young lady from Wisconsin.”

“Her father’s from Wisconsin.”

“That’s right. How’s she doing?”

“She’s got six months now. And her slips aren’t so bad, so she’s been effectively sober for eight years. Although I don’t think she’s really hit bottom.”

“How long ago did we speak?”

“It’s been… months.”

Bill wipes his eyes under his glasses like he’s tired.

“Seems like five minutes ago. Time doesn’t make any sense here.”

He begins to look around.

Begins to look agitated.

“Bill.”

Bill looks at Andrew again.

“Yeah, sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. I was just wondering if you’re still comfortable being my sponsor. This is a…”

Andrew trails off.

“Highly unusual situation, I know,” Bill finishes for him, “but, sure. I’ll keep meeting with you. What else have I got to do with myself, after all? And I say that without asperity.”

“Great.”

“So what’s on your mind?”

“I… wonder if giving up magic and giving up drinking are similar things.”

“Sure they are. Thinking about going back to church?”

Bill is in earnest when he says this. Andrew suppresses a laugh but acknowledges that it would have been a sorry, yellow little laugh anyway.

“No.”

“That’s up to you, of course.”

And where did church get you, old man? Is that heaven? Is that even you?

“Yeah. I just wonder if I could give it up now. If I wanted to.”

“Not alone, certainly.”

What exactly is my higher power, anyway?

“I’m sorry. It just. It feels good to talk to you.”

“Lost your dad young, did you?”

“I did.”

“It’s a hard thing not to have your dad. You look for what you’re not getting from him in other people. And that’s okay. Love is always A-OK.”

Andrew nods.

Tears are close.

He fights them back.

And here sits the magus in a dim room, using dirty tricks to disturb a dead man’s rest, crying because he wants his daddy and his mommy.

Boo fucking hoo.

“We have sponsors in the world of magic, too. Mentors.”

Bill just listens.

“Mine lived in Ohio.”

25

1977.

Near Xenia, Ohio.

The last warm day of the year.

“I’m not queer,” the driver says.

“That’s not my business,” Andrew Randolph Blankenship says, although he has just begun to wonder why a bald, bearded man with his shirt unbuttoned to show his potbelly might slow his big, blue Impala to a crawl next to a teenaged boy walking his bicycle.

“You always walk your bike past this house.”

The man points at a lopsided 1890s two-story with peeling blue paint and a sun-faded FOR SALE sign.

Andrew doesn’t say anything. He just furrows his brow as he often does when he is processing a lot of information.

Watching me? Is this guy dangerous? Does he know why I walk my bike here? Does he see her too?

“You know there’s a ghost in that house, don’t you?”

Andrew feels his heart thudding in his chest.

There is a ghost and it scares the shit out of me.

I walk my bike because I’ve wrecked twice knowing it was looking at me.

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t sir me.”

“Okay.”

Andrew scratches at one of the sideburns he has begun to grow in emulation of his older brother. Although Charles will soon shave his because they look too “hippy-dippy.”

But this dude.

Who is this dude?

“She swells up like a balloon when you ride your bike past it because she has a crush on you. She was seventeen when she died. Your age now, if I’m correct?”

“Yes s— Yes.”

Andrew peers into the car, which is closer now. He is relieved to see that the driver is wearing pants. Dungarees, to be precise.

“Do you know why you can see her?”

Andrew shakes his head.

A car horn blares because the older man has let his Impala wander into the other lane. He looks at the road again and corrects his path as a mud-colored flatbed pickup truck stacked with pumpkins goes by, losing a pumpkin, its driver half-unfurling an arthritic bird-finger.

“Do you want a ride past the house? I’ll take you the rest of the way to Enon.”

Andrew does want a ride.

He doesn’t want to see the floating girl in the window leering at him, her head as big as a head on a parade float.

And he doesn’t want to spend forty minutes pedaling when those forty minutes might be spent napping. He got almost no sleep last night and the girl he made love to in the cornfield got grounded.

It was worth it.

The lovemaking, quick and earnest, was after they tampered with the letters on the Xenia Baptist Church marquee so that REPENT, MY PEOPLE, YOUR TIME TO SIN GROWETH SHORT now said GO SIT ON PETERS HOT POLE.

Now a pale yellow station wagon underbellied with rust the color of Chef Boyardee spaghetti sauce swings around the Impala, the driver barking some hostile syllable through his open window.

The bald man’s eyes stay fixed on Andrew.

“And I’ll tell you why you and I can see the dead girl and that guy can’t.”

The boy stops.

A turkey buzzard kites lazily overhead.

“Is there room for my bike?”

“There is.”

Now the man who will teach Andrew his first spell pulls his car over in front of the boy. He opens the huge trunk so the Impala looks like a whale opening its mouth.

Its mouth is very black.

Its tongue a spare tire.

Andrew feeds the whale his Schwinn and prepares to go to Nineveh.

26

“Is he still living?”

“No.”

Silence.

“He taught you what you’re doing now? With me?”

“Yes,” Andrew says.

“I’m sure it occurred to you to try this with him.”

“He asked me not to.”

“Why’s that?”

“He didn’t say.”

And yet I do it to you.

Bill nods inscrutably. Then says, “There’s something else, isn’t there? You’re not just lonely. You’re scared.”

“Yes.”

“And this fear’s got you missing John Barleycorn.”

“More like Gilbert Grape for me, but yes.”

He won’t know that reference.

“I’m glad you sought me out.”

“Are you really?”

“I am.”

“Are you really you, Bill?”

“I don’t know how to answer that.”

Bill wipes his eyes again.

How many alcoholics would like to be able to do this? Would give anything for this chance? To talk to HIM. Thank HIM personally. Why is it fair that I get to have this to myself? And if I let Anneke see him, what is that? Showing off? I should let him go. Burn this tape.

“Andy.”

Only he gets to call me Andy.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t send me back yet.”

Andrew raises his eyebrows in place of asking Why?

Bill W. says, “The next time I’m awake… talking… I’ll be talking to you. I’m always the same, but you… I’m a little concerned about what you’ll have to tell me when I see you again. There’s a cloud over you.”

“A cloud?”

“I don’t know how else to put it. Just… sit with me here for a minute. Is there music there?”

“Music?”

“You know, a phonograph?”

“There’s music.”

“Play me something. Please.”

Andrew goes to his stereo.

Turns on satellite radio.

Turns on the forties channel, turns it up good and loud.

Betty Hutton’s “Blue Skies” pours from the speakers in no great hurry.

Bill W. closes his eyes, leans toward the screen.

Moves his head in time to the music, subtly, reminding Andrew of a cobra coming out of its basket for a snake charmer.

Now Andrew cries.

“There it comes,” Bill says, eyes still closed.

And then he says, opening his eyes suddenly, fiercely,

“You’re the one who needed the music. It’s a shoehorn for your feelings, like the booze used to be. Shut me down when you want to, son. Everything’s A-OK.”

27

Early evening.

The barn behind Andrew’s house.

Anneke belches and excuses herself, moves away from the warm pocket of garlicky air she has just made. The ghost of the penne, spicy sausage, and basil Andrew sautéed for them earlier can’t overpower the stronger odor of hot, raw walleye.

“How lonely and deranged do you have to be to want to blow-dry a fish, anyway?”

He touches the yellow pike’s side with the back of his hand, decides it wants another blast. He flicks the on switch and wands hot air back and forth over the fish. Wrinkles his nose as he detects her belch and aims the dryer at it, making her laugh.

“Better than hot fish. It smells like your dead mermaid friend in here,” she says, raising her voice over the dryer’s petulant whine.

Andrew smiles.

“It makes the skin thirsty so it drinks pigment,” he says.

“I’m not five. I know why you do it. I’m just saying it stinks.”

She sips her diet soda.

Now Andrew brushes a brownish, mustardy shade of yellow on the fish, which sits almost flush in the fish-shaped niche Andrew cut into a silvery panel of insulation foam.

“I thought you said you wanted to watch me do this.”

“I do. I’ll be good.”

Andrew grunts skeptically, begins swabbing rusty orange ink onto the fins he pinned in place against the foam. She looks up and around, taking in the twenty-odd fish prints he has framed and hung out here. Sturgeons, carp, black bass, coho salmon, in many colors, some naturalistic, some fantastical, all swimming north, as though toward the lake they were pulled from.

One Prussian blue octopus from a trip to Florida drifts amid the school as though lost.

“Gyotaku?”

“Gyotaku,” he corrects, but she can’t hear the difference.

Now he takes a piece of rice paper and lays it over the walleye, tucking it under and around the fish, massaging the color up into the paper. He details the fins with a plastic spoon.

“Okay, I like this. I’m not saying I want to learn. But I like it.”

He grunts again, his barely blinking eyes fixed on his work.

He pulls the paper off.

“Nice!” she says.

“I’ll let this dry for a bit and then I’ll do the eyes. I’m not much of an artist, but I can handle fish eyes.”

He clothespins the paper to a line, then sits down on the moth-eaten Goodwill couch next to the dorm-sized fridge he used to keep stocked with German and British brown ales.

He pulls a fizzy water out instead.

They both just sit for a long while.

The sun goes down and moths wheel and flutter around the bare bulb overhead.

“Are you nervous?” she asks.

“No,” he lies.

28

Full dark.

The fireflies outside have largely given up.

Andrew has spread himself lengthwise on the couch, hands on chest like a pharaoh ready for the wrap. Feet bare. Blue jeans. No belt. No shirt. His hair a dark pillow under his head.

He asked her to watch him, so she sits opposite, on the rusty folding chair.

She bats a moth away from her eyes.

Another, larger moth crawls on his face, but she is afraid to touch him now, so the moth remains.

Andrew watches the moth, too.

He’s next to her, out of his body.

When he realizes this, his body gets goose bumps.

He sees his body get goose bumps.

29

He turns now—it feels like turning his body but he believes this is just how he explains it to himself—and looks at Anneke. He wants to put his nose in the hollow of her ear and smell her unadorned, slightly spicy scent, but the part of him that wants that has no nose. Her neck is tan and lovely, and her eyes shine with curiosity and concern as she looks down on his body. He sees

with what eyes?

the fine hairs on her cheeks, sees her pulse gently thrumming in her temples, feels the rhythm of her heart. He moves closer to her, almost mingling with her, begins to feel that he is putting off what he fears to do. But it’s so good to be this near her. Is this what it is to be a ghost? No… he is still connected with his body. He tries to breathe in her scent, hears

with what ears?

his lungs fill where he lies on the couch, thinks he can smell her now. Anneke. She smiles a little, looking down at him, turns down the corners of her mouth trying to suppress the smile, so he follows her gaze and sees why.

He’s getting an erection, bulging at the zipper of his faded jeans.

Oh, that’s great.

Just great.

He has the urge to cover himself, and now his hands obey the impulse, his face flushing red, a worry line on his half-sleeping forehead. Anneke bites her knuckle to keep from braying laughter, but the laughter wells up in her. Andrew-on-the-couch now half turns his body away from her, makes an involuntary growl like a frustrated bear.

Anneke turns away, too, laughter escaping in hitches around her fist. She fishes out a cigarette and puts it in her mouth, but she doesn’t light it.

“Say,” she stage-whispers between laughs, “I can light this even if you’re floating around, right? You’re not flammable or anything? Like methane?”

She’s laughing so hard she’s almost crying.

“Help! My friend turned himself into a fart and I burned him up!”

Now Andrew laughs next to her, his belly hitching where he lies on the couch. He reaches out

with what hand?

and tries to light her cigarette for her, his physical hand twitching.

She steps farther away from the couch now, moves through Andrew, who, almost against his will, allows himself to be dragged along in her.

He has never felt anything like this—it is electric, delicious… it feels like burnt caramel tastes. He senses that if he lingers, he will soon be the one feeling through her skin, moving her limbs,

and what will happen to Anneke?

but this is only for an instant—he pushes out of her.

And that sensation of pushing makes him remember something from the text… the push can be turned around so it happens entering the body. If you push while entering, snapping your own tether, you can knock the other soul completely free and into death. If you try and you’re weak at it, if you don’t believe, you’ll be the dead one.

But Andrew did not push.

He melted into her like liquid caramel, and it was hard to leave.

All Anneke has time to feel is a flash of numbness, as though her heart has skipped two beats, and she understands what has happened. Her laughter dies like a caught breeze. She shivers. Fear winks in her eye, then turns, as it always does with her, into curiosity. She turns to where she thinks he is and says, as if she has dared herself to speak before she can take it back, “Do it again.”

She heels a tear of laughter from under the corner of her eye.

“Do it again, I want you to,” she says, and looks down at his body. His head is gently shaking no.

She lights the cigarette.

30

Andrew-out-of-Andrew rushes away from the barn, at the speed of a sprint, faster than a sprint, now at a gallop, and he takes off. He looks back at the barn below him, only it isn’t precisely like looking behind him, as he has no neck to swivel; it feels a bit like he’s a nautilus, jetting backward through inky water, tentacles trailing behind it. Nothing trails behind Andrew. He is nothing, has nothing.

The barn recedes, light bleeding through the pineboard walls, etching the high grass and short trees around it in faint gold. Anneke is in there, smoking her Winston down to the filter, mantling her consciousness over his half-vacant body while his consciousness soars over Cayuga County. He turns now, the nautilus transforming to owl, attention cast forward. Trees loom at him and he pushes through them, feeling their slower, muted rhythms, rustling their leaves as if he himself has become a breeze.

No drug can do this.

Now he follows the coast south and west, away from Dog Neck Harbor, skimming low over the water, watching the lights in the windows, the bluish glow of televisions anesthetizing tired fishermen and waitresses and one winks out—there!—where young parents begin to caress each other in earnest now that their children have gone to sleep.

Don’t look in that window, you pervert.

He knows his body chuckles in the barn behind him, miles behind him now, but he can’t think about that or his tether, stretched like a rubber band, might snap him back into himself.

He sees something over the water.

Reddish light collected in a form that moves on the lake, its nucleus a ball of white. It is the size of an oil tanker. He moves away from it.

What is that?

Don’t let it see you.

No, really, what the fuck IS that?

This is not the first strange thing he’s seen while traveling out-of-body. Nor is it the scariest. But it might be the biggest.

It roils and rolls in on itself, moving slowly, flashing as if with internal lightning. He thinks that he will probably never know just what it is. He senses it, senses neither malevolence nor goodwill, just power. Indifference. A god? A devil? An alien? None of the above?

If you sense it, maybe it can sense you.

His tether spasms, nearly whips him back into his body, then nearly… what? Breaks?

Not out here.

Not with that.

It stops.

It starts to drift toward him now.

He thinks of the Titanic steering away from its iceberg, slowly, too late.

Only I’m the Titanic and that’s the iceberg.

Oh, fuck that.

He flies lower, skimming the water like a pelican.

He knows he is moaning in the barn.

The tether pulls at him, but he resists.

Not yet, I haven’t learned enough yet, and I’m not going to let that thing scare me off; even if I’m what it’s looking for, even if it eats souls, I defy it to find me.

(Careful!)

He moves over the shore, up a small bluff, into the woods.

He moves now as if on legs, down a fire trail.

A bat flutters near him, through him, reaping mosquitoes and moths. He flinches, his body jerking on the couch, but then it flies through him again, then again; it knows he’s there, it likes the feeling like Anneke did. He relaxes, lets it. Feels the purr of its tiny heart beating hundreds of beats per minute, feels the craving for moth in its mouth, the dusty, gritty joy that moth flesh is, and then he wants the bat to go away and it does, careening off into the night.

Behind him, a reddish glow on the water, still far away, but he moves faster now. The fire trail becomes a paved road and he moves along its side. A cabin looms on his left, light pouring from its front window. Inside, a sixtyish bald man with a beard and small glasses hunches over a chessboard, his legs crossed at the knees European-style, but he senses that the man is American, has trained himself to do that. He moves a white pawn, consults a book, then moves a black pawn. He lifts a glass of wine to his lips, a rubyish droplet spilling down his beard, then disappearing within it.

Now the glow is over land, but farther away, heading toward Rochester. It moved fast when he wasn’t watching.

Or there are more than one of them.

That’s your fear talking. There’s only one. It doesn’t see you, doesn’t want you.

He flies again, moving left, back toward the water.

To his right, a dark cabin, wooden stairs leading sharply down from its back deck.

Beneath him dry sand becomes wet sand becomes rocks, here and there punctuated with driftwood or seaweed. He pelicans over the water again, and then he sees it.

It sees him.

A ghost.

Under the water.

A bloated older man’s ghost floats under the surface of the lake, its form luminous gray-green, like algae, its eyes two holes of starlight, locked on Andrew.

It surfaces.

Oh shit, it’s time to go.

The tether jerks.

A luminous hand rises from the water, grabs something.

Grabs the invisible umbilicus anchoring him to his body.

Shakes it savagely.

NO!

Shakes it harder.

PLEASE!

The puffy phosphorescent head of the dead man comes out of the lake and bites at the air with black teeth. Andrew feels something like pain where his belly should be.

Now it is pain, excruciating pain.

The tether is down to threads, but the last threads are tough and the thing can’t quite sever them.

Cold I’m cold!

Andrew tries to move away, but he is pulled down by his tether until a fatty dead arm loops around his neck, pulls him under the surface of the water.

How do I have a neck? Oh fuck my soul is almost all here now, I’m about to die. Help! HELP! PLEASE!

The dead face leers at him.

No bubbles.

It doesn’t breathe.

But it speaks.

In Russian.

“It is an unpleasant thing to drown.”

The eyes are not starlight anymore, just milky white lamps, like the lamps deepwater fish use to lure prey.

Panicked, Andrew tries to think of what to do. He cannot escape the half headlock he is in, the soft but insistent mass of it somehow handling his nonmass, nor is his tether strong enough to snap him back.

“With your permission, I would like to show you my new home.”

Dragomirov!

And now they dive.

Down and down.

Past a school of fish, just dark, blunt shapes moving around and through the diving souls.

A ship comes into view on the bottom, lit only by the witch-light given off by the ghost.

“Isn’t it pretty?”

Andrew is shoved now, pushed through a tear in the hull.

He sees a quintet of skeletons through the murk and detritus, all sitting at a table with plates and cups near them, the remains of their clothes around them.

The rusalka had been busy.

Maybe only one drowning a year, if all of them were here, but since this had started before 1930, she had brought a lot of lives to their end.

She is a one-woman disaster, played out in slow motion.

She is a monster.

Now Andrew is held by the nape, brought face-to-face with a skeleton sitting in the corner.

“Look. This one is me. You can see my clothes are in better repair, and those fucking mussels haven’t had time to grow on me like the forgotten ones in the engine room. She tends us, you know, the recent ones. Keeps us clean, like dolls in a dollhouse. I bought those jeans at the Nordstrom, International Mall, Tampa. One hundred fifty dollars. And now, look. Look at the dental work I had done in Mexico, such art, these crowns, art by Dr. Hernan Rodriguez of Leon, and for what? For your pretty bitch to drown me for a joke in a cold lake.”

I’m sorry.

“The devil take your sorry.”

The fatty thing holding him shudders violently, begins to come apart, bits of its not-flesh drifting off it. Andrew can see through parts of it now, but also its witch-light is fading. It is getting dark in this ship.

“I have to go now, the bitch is coming back.”

Nadia!

“But let me tell you something, Mister Andrew. You’ll be sorry soon. I know who you are now, and I will tell her.”

Your niece?

“You poor fucker!”

It laughs now, shaking itself to pieces, its light almost completely gone. Its voice is strangled, as if it is drowning again.

“But I’ll tell her to make it quick. If you do something for me.”

What?

“Find my dog. Find my little Caspar.”

31

Complete darkness.

Cold.

Andrew screams.

Cold arms find him, cradle his head, a stiff, cold nipple brushes his cheek down in the dead ship.

“You idiot,” the rusalka says, kissing his mouth.

32

Light.

Warmth.

Andrew screams.

Warm arms find him, cradle his head, a soft breast beneath the cotton of a T-shirt.

Anneke is crying.

“You idiot,” she says, kissing his mouth.

33

“I thought you were dead. You looked pretty dead.”

She uses a roll of paper towels and a bottle of rubbing alcohol to swab his upper lip and chin. While the weightless parts of Andrew were touring the depths of Lake Ontario, his body sprung the mother of all nosebleeds. It dropped its other ballast, too, but Anneke won’t let go of him yet.

He is lying under a blanket, the blanket topped with his leather jacket.

“I need to change my pants.”

She hugs his head to her chest one more time.

Salvador paces behind her.

“Send Jeeves for new pants. I don’t want you walking yet.”

“Salvador, please get me a pair of jeans.”

Happy to have a task, the wicker man disappears from the buggy barn and heads for the main house.

“Well, since you’re my sponsor, I guess you’re the one I tell I really want a drink right now.”

He nods his head, shivering.

The lake’s cold is in his bones.

“You know what the worst thing was? When I thought Elvis had left the building for real, my first thought wasn’t, ‘Oh God, my friend is dead.’ My first thought was, ‘They’ll think I killed him—I’m going back to prison.’ How’s that for sucking? As a person, I mean. Who’s that selfish?”

She won’t let herself cry.

He wrestles free of her, goes to the barn door, leans over and vomits. Cold lake water comes out of him.

She brings him a paper towel for his mouth.

“I don’t understand half of what happened tonight,” he says. “But somebody’s coming for me. Somebody dangerous. And I think I know who’s sending her.”

“Who?”

“I don’t want to say her name. But I think it’s time I gave you a proper tour of my house. And I think it’s time I told you what happened to me in Russia.”

It stinks of lake now, worse than before.

“Is time you were telling me, too,” the naked woman with the dreadlocked auburn mane says. She walks dripping into the barn, eyeing Anneke territorially.

Anneke does some eyeing of her own.

“You have cigarette for me?”

“You know where they are.”

Nadia pads across the barn floor, reaches into the jacket pocket.

Anneke watches her, willing herself not to react to her smell.

Nadia pulls out a bright yellow cigarette pack, but the cigarette she pulls from it is broken in half.

“Shit,” she says, smelling the blond strands of tobacco.

Anneke offers her a Winston.

The rusalka takes it.

34

He tells them what happened to him in Russia.