The narrator visits a friend and his wife who both swear that the old man dying in the next room is Alistair Crowley.
By the facility of internetting you can retrace the steps that led you to what everybody around you calls your ‘life juncture’. You can remake your contacts. You can visit up and bathe in the dusty comfort of nostalgias. So tombstones of equinox rainclouds and trees of lightning later, I flew in on the Tuesday delay and taxied directly to Chester Plossinby’s where he’d arranged to accommodate me and, as he said in his email, “treat me like a prince.” I explained the ‘life juncture’ merely as a ‘life juncture’ rather than describing how my entire existence had melted down into a brown puddle like a Mars Bar on midsummer’s day. I hoped he understood.
I hadn’t seen Plossinby in thirteen years. The previous time was in a hailstorm. He married Nicola Truffleback on a miserable afternoon – a hailstone the size of a golfball smacked the celebrant in the forehead and knocked him unconscious - and then they drove away. He was, by any recollection, a pimply dweeb, an Anglo-Saxon specimen, not even a Norman, thick-rimmed, grubby, a champion at chess, a bore for battles of World War One and already balding at twenty-three. I imagined him as a pudgy moon-faced accountant by now.
The door opened and greeting me was a tall dark Spanish man with shoulder length hair and a well-groomed goatee.
“Hello,” I say, “I’m looking for someone named Chester Plossinby.”
The Spaniard immediately stepped out and embraced me, squeezing, saying, “Simon, Simon, its been so long!” In a thick Catalian accent.
When he finally let go I said it again, uncomfortable. “Hello, I’m looking for someone named Chester Plossinby.”
The Spaniard grinned, opened his arms and reiterated with emphasis: “Simon, Simon, its been so long!”
Plossinby? No way.
From that point on, not even in the door, I was perplexed, a ridiculous prince. No angle nor symmetry bore the slightest resemblance to the Chester J. Plossinby I had known and not liked very much thirteen years beforehand. Not his face, not his nose, not his eyebrows, not his ears, not his voice, not the color of his eyes, nor that of any of his ancestors either. Chester Plossinby? The internet had failed me, I surmised. I’ve got the wrong man!
Bustling from the rear room came Nicola Truffleback – yes, the real Nicola Truffleback, for sure – and exactly thirteen years older.
“Oh, hi….!” she exclaimed, dramatic. Unchanged. Same girl. “Come in! Come in!” A smile. “Chester,” she says, “Chester honey, help him with his bag.”
Chester Honey helped me with my bag.
But didn’t Chester Plossinby have a mole on his milky white English left cheek? And a nose that was flat and British, not pointy in a Mediterranean way? A dweeb. A geek. A dickhead. He could bore you to suicide with tales of the Battle of the Somme. His idea of a big night in was a four hour chess marathon with take-out slurpies from Pizza Hut. I shook my head and thought I must be getting my memory of him confused with someone else - a case of mistaken identity, possibly attributable to my former cannabis habit, or, perhaps, just the passing years. Either way, this Chester Plossinby, carrying my bag and welcoming me into his and Nicola’s apartment, was someone I was certain I had never met before in my entire long-legged life. Do I know you Senor?
“Simon, Simon, its been so long,” he said again. It was something he’d rehearsed. In fact, it was the only sentence he seemed to know.
“You’ve lost a lot of weight,” I said, but failed to mention that he’d also gained eight inches in height, olive skin, brown eyes, a full head of black follicles and a Spaniard’s broken English.
“Did you have a good flight?” asked Nicola.
“Terrible,” I said.
“Yeah. Its Jupiter in Aries,” she assured me.
Jupiter in Aries?
At this instant, flashing forth from the etheric, it was as though a row of candles burst into flame and, looking around, shaking off my Spanish-ish discombobulation, I was suddenly cognizant of their living room, tidy and squat, replete with occult paraphernalia. Pentacles and sphinxes. The Seal of Solomon. Sigils of Austin Spare. Remnants of the Gnostic Rosary. Insignia from the eleventh degree of esoteric masonry. Hexagrams from the wheel of the great Ye King. The High Priestess card from the Rider-Waite Tarot sitting between the B and the J, pillars of the mystic Adytum.
“Nice place,” I said, looking around. “Cosy!”
I glanced at the bookshelves. An array of soft-bound mystica.
Nicola explained that the rent in the district had trebled over the last three years and the prices were driving ordinary folk like her and Chester away. I looked at Chester for confirmation of this realty assessment. He smiled. “Simon, Simon, its been so long,” he said yet again and threatened to hug me a second time.
“And… how long have you been here?” I ask.
“Seven years now,” says Nicola. “but at this rate we’ll have to move.”
A sweet girl. No one could ever work out why she would marry a pasty-faced dork like Plossinby. At the wedding, several drunken guests had almost said so. I had almost said so. Everyone thought she was destined for my best friend Neville. He celebrated the hailstorm, a disappointed man.
Sitting, she introduced me to their dog, Mathers, an old border collie with remarkably floppy ears. He lay in the corner, rarely moving nowadays, she explained.
“And Mathers is too old to move. The move would probably kill him,” she added with compassion. “Mathers is everything to us.”
I looked over at the dog. Its knowing brown eyes rolled across to catch my gaze. I felt it didn’t like me.
Childless? Just Mathers? Working? Nicola was a librarian, she said. Chester? Between jobs.
“Its very kind of you to put me up,” I said.
Awkward silence.
“Its so great to see you, Simon!” Nicola then enthused. She was completely phony. But the so-called Chester took it as a cue to exclaim in a thoroughly Spanish way, “Simon!” and I waited for “Its been so long…” but it didn’t arrive this time.
Dinner was Spanish fabadas and tortillas with sour cream. Then, after dinner, some TV, broken conversation, not a chess set in sight - and I retook my bearings and realized to myself that, by golly! I have never met this handsome Spanish dude named Chester Plossinby before in my entire freaking life!
“Do you remember that science teacher we had?” I laughed, at one point. “What was his name?”
Chester grinned at me Spanishly.
“Oh, you mean old Snodgrass. Professor Snodgrass?” interrupted Nicola. She knew.
Later I tried asking, “Do you remember the time we drove up to that lake one Saturday afternoon Chester? What was the name of that lake again?”
The Spanish Chester grinned at me Spanishly again as if to say, once more, “Its been so long!”
Whoever this guy was he didn’t have a single memory, not one, conforming to the stated record. Did he remember the time Timmy Piper and Maria Lepetri were caught tickling rigid in the stairwell? Or the time Matthew Frilby threw up all over the piano at the music recital in Year 11? Not a thing.
“Hey, what about the time you got caught in the lift in the science building?” I joked, reminiscing. “Those were the days, hey Chester?”
Nicola interrupted by jumping to her feet and fussing over Mathers who, aged and patchy, had strings of saliva hanging from his mouth.
“He’s in the early phases of Alzheimer’s,” she explained.
“Dogs can get Alzheimer’s?” I wondered.
Nicola said there was new research suggesting so.
“I think I must be getting it too,” I said. “My memory’s not what it used to be.”
I looked around once more. Candles. The Qabbalah wall chart. The Moon Planting Guide. Talisman’s for warding off the ghosts of former days.
“Do you remember the time, Chester” I tried again, “when we locked you in the trunk of Spazzo Miller’s clunky Falcon down by the railway station?”
Turning to Chester. No entiendo.
At which Nicola, pretending to yawn, declared it bedtime.
At this point, shaking myself out of a lethargy of bland acceptance, I felt like saying, “Who are you and what you have done with that poor pimply dork I once knew and despised?” but then I remembered jet lag and wondered ‘Who am I to pry?’ Maybe Nicola had put him through a meat-grinder and was using his identity to smuggle in illegal immigrants from Barcelona? Oh well. In any case, I hoped that, after a good sleep, the world might perhaps return to its frayed normality. Maybe I would wake up in the morning, the Spaniard would be gone, the occult odds and ends would be transformed into war memorabilia of the Hun, and the freckled Plossinby of old, now an intensely dull accountant, would be sitting at the breakfast table boring me senseless with tales of hapless German campaigns just as I’d remembered.
Bedtime? Sure. I’d had enough for one day. My ‘life juncture’ was calling. What was wrong with me? I doodled. I longed for happy recollections, sustainable certainties. I almost asked Nicola if she could read my palm and tell me I would travel. This was not the trip I’d hastily arranged.
“Bedtime?” I said. “Yeah. I am sort of weary…” And I was.
Then, bedtime also failed to be uneventful. One expects an uneventful bedtime by the days when misspent nostalgias lead you off to rainy cities just in the hopes of reconstituted change. I had no desire to detail how that brown puddle of sludge had replaced my golden days. I was decidedly off my game. I was happy to just take whatever comes. So, that night - a stranger in a strange land - I went to bed with only ordinary expectations. I cleaned my teeth, stripped down to my boxers and settled down listening to unfamiliar streets when, drowsy, I was interrupted – it was barely a few minutes after lights out, I suppose – by unaccountable noises from the room beyond the bedroom wall. Opening my eyes, I figured it was the adjoining apartment, presumably apartment ninety-three. The wheezing, wheezing, wheezing of a damaged man.
I flicked on the light and sat up. As I say, the wheezing, wheezing, wheezing of a damaged man. Wheezing in the dead of night.
Then, at that moment, Nicola and Chester rushed in wearing their fluffy pyjamas.
What? said my face.
“Listen to that!” says Nicola, hushed, motioning her earlobe wallward. “Can you hear that?”
I listened. There was – perhaps – a gaseous and wheezing sound in fits and spurts muffled by the old world plaster. Definitely. Hmmm?
“What is it?” I wondered.
“Not it. Who?” my hostess corrected me.
“OK. Who is it?”
She made me listen again. Do I hear it this time? I do. It was keeping me awake. I checked that I was not, in fact, dreaming, and looked at Chester – tall, dark, Spanish – standing at my bedside table. There was a long silence. Then a cough from the room beyond. Nicola was in a drama-school suspense.
“Nicola,” I said. “Who is it?”
“Its Alistair Crowley,” she said quietly. A whisper. A pause. “But you’re not to tell anyone.”
The secret was safe with me. I decided to listen again, as a practical but stop-gap measure against consideration of what she had just announced. Said what? Say that again?
“Definitely something,” I say. “A wheezing sound. Like someone’s got pneumonia.”
“Its Alistair Crowley,” says Nicola, still hushed. “He’s dying!”
The Spaniard had nothing to add. I looked at him. He said not a thing - in Spanish, insofar as there is a Spanish way of saying nothing.
“If you mean the notorious English occultist from the first half of the twentieth century,” I say, “ I suspect he might be dead already…”
“We do mean the notorious English occultist from the first half of the twentieth century, don’t we Chester?” said Nicola, turning to Chester.
Chester says, “Si.”
“And he’s not dead already. He faked his own funeral and disappeared having discovered the elixir of life.”
I decided to listen again before asking, “Then why is he dieing?”
The answer was obvious.
“Because members of the Black Brotherhood came around to his apartment recently disguised as guys installing broadband and took the elixir away from him and it is now in the possession of the Black Lodge. Without the elixir Master Therion will surely die.”
“Master Therion?”
“Alistair Crowley. Prophet of the Aeon of Horus.”
“I see.”
I had another listen to the wall. What else could I do? “Its sort of a wheezing sound,” I confirmed, “or perhaps its more of an electric sound. Its hard to tell…It might be a type of drill…or a food processor?”
Over the next half hour we all listened in paranormal silence and looked at the bare wall as if looking at it would help us hear. But the wheezing had ended and the night was still and the sounds of the unfamiliar streets were a simple lullaby again.
Eventually, Nicola, turning to Senor Chester, said, “Its stopped.” And they agreed, without much further communication, to go back to bed.
“So…” I said, helplessly, “I’II call you if I hear anything more… will I????”
Nicola just shook her head as if to say, “There are dark days upon us, dear friend. Fiat Lux!”
I turned off the light, put my dazed head to the pillow and in due course dreamt of a chubby Scotsman on a mountaintop, thinking, lucidly, ‘What have they done with Plossinby?’ and determined that, next morning, the world would be normal again.
****
There is no need to describe breakfast. It was Spanish omelets and the dumpy frame of the Plossinby I had known was not at the breakfast table. Instead, some strange Spaniard with a neat goatee sat grinning and sharing not a single coherent recollection. Nicola stayed in her room except for once, stepping out, barefoot, in a long black robe, swinging a censor and fumigating the living room with dense clouds of frankincense and dragon’s blood.
It was then I knew I should be moving on.
“Do you remember,” I asked Chester, “the time that I mistook your sister for a man and she attacked me with a pop-rivet gun. What’s her name again?”
The Spaniard looked inane, all smile, and offered me another omelet, since I was being treated like a prince. “Simon, Simon,” he said….
“I know. I know,” I said. “Its been so long…”
I called a cab and sat waiting to be buzzed from Reception. Nicola went to work and Chester took a two-hour shower. I flicked through a book on the sacred magic of Abramelin the mage, a chilling tale of demonry and spells and crusty evocation.
Sitting thus in my reverie Mathers of the long floppy ears dawdled out from the dark kitchenette. He walked directly up, drooling with Alzheimer’s, and just as the buzzer went, looked at me, rolling his big brown eyes, and spoke.
“That really is Alistair Crowley in there,” the dog said, “and when he dies all hell breaks loose! You know that, don’t you?”
Then he turned around and dawdled back into the darkness.
No comments:
Post a Comment