On the train home from Sour Candy, I unfolded the papers I’d found at Lily’s flat and something fell out. I bent to pick it up.
It was a tarot card. But not a modern one. It was old. The paper was thick but also soft and frayed at the edges. And the print quality was poor, like it had been rolled over a carved block. The once-colorful ink had faded, but the card itself was dark—browned from decades (maybe even centuries) of use. On it, a barefoot man in tatters held a walking stick. A cat leapt up and pulled his pants down, and he faced the viewer bare-assed. The caption said LE MAT in an archaic Latin script.
On the back, someone had printed neatly in Sharpie. I read the words aloud.
“Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas. Huh.”
The papers surprised me. They had been photocopied from a book on the occult. I don’t know what I expected a book on the occult to be like, but this was dry and scholarly. The first bit was on Isaac Newton, the supposed father of science, who was totally into alchemy and Biblical numerology. In school they act like he was trying to prove everything was one giant machine, but that was apparently invented later as deliberate propaganda. Historians know it, too. Everybody just perpetuates the lie because it’s convenient or whatever. Newton actually spent the last years of his life obsessed with cracking the secret numerical code he thought was hidden in the Bible, and also persecuting some guy named Leibniz.
According to the book, there was a time when magic was part of the world, same as anything else, which is why every pre-modern culture everywhere believed in it, but that there are only bits and pieces left, that everything else was deliberately obscured over hundred of years by this group called The Masters, also sometimes called the High Arcane, who were like a council I guess, made of the most powerful practitioners of every age. They said no one could talk about magic and stuff directly. It was forbidden, and if you did it anyway and got caught, they locked you up someplace bad. Some really talented people were allowed to write about it, but they had to use “keys and ciphers” to keep everything esoteric.
Newton was a Master, and the guy Leibniz was in trouble for revealing things they said he wasn’t supposed to. They had this whole rivalry that went on for years, back and forth.
When I got the end of that section, I realized it may have been included merely out of necessity. The book had been photocopied in landscape format, with two pages per sheet. Each page of the book was printed in two columns, like a dictionary. And in fact, it seemed to be a kind of encyclopedia. A new entry began toward the bottom of the last column on the first photocopied page: SACRED MARRIAGE.
I flipped the sheet and saw a two-page spread of a painting, probably originally in color. In the middle, an oval stone, shimmering like an opal, hovered in the air between a naked man and woman whose arms outstretched towards it. Between them, under the stone, grew a flowering tree.
I leaned forward and read the tiny caption. “The Tree of Life and the Lapis Philosophorum.”
I flipped to the next page. “Whoa . . .”
Amid the dense two-column text, a flame-tongued demon dribbled blood from his lips. Around him were various objects at the points of a pentagram. Below him was an altar covered in the blood fallen from his mouth. On one side, a pregnant woman held up a chalice. On the other, a dark-robed man held a snub blade, which someone had circled vigorously in blue ink. Their genitals were exposed. His phallus was erect and aloft at the same angle as the blade.
The caption read: The athame is the ceremonial dagger, representing the masculine principle, just as the chalice, or grail, represents the feminine.
The word athame was also circled. I held the picture to my face to get a closer view of the altar in the picture. It looked freakily similar to the one I had seen.
“Rich people are so weird . . .”
Alchemy, the book explained, wasn’t actually about turning lead into gold, even though that’s what everyone was supposed to think. It’s really about the deep structure of creation. Not like atoms and stuff—that’s regular old chemistry—but below that. Resolving the conundrums of existence. The whole thing with lead and gold was a cipher, a riddle to throw off the greedy and foolish. Those who were too stupid to realize it, who got bewitched by the lure of wealth, got hung up there and wasted their lives chasing after a fiction. The truth was much simpler. Gold is bright, like sunshine. It’s a light, malleable metal that’s easily made into various things. Lead is heavy. Dull. Dark. Impenetrable. Not even Superman could see through it. In the symbolism of turning lead into gold, gold represents wealth of knowledge and all that. And lead is ignorance. So, alchemy is the transmutation of ignorance into knowledge—ultimate knowledge. That’s what it was all about, the search for Truth.
There were lots of different alchemical investigations, but the big thing everyone wanted to produce was the lapis philosophorum, the “stone of truth” or something like that. But not like a rock—more like an opal or a gem, like how all the old sutras refer to the teachings of the Buddha as a jewel. That’s what the lapis is, the “jewel” of ultimate knowledge—namely, how to be like God, a return to the divine state pretty much every religion says existed way back at the beginning, before we were corrupted: Immortality.
Sounds dangerous, right? And it is. Which is why these guys, The Masters, worked for hundreds of years or whatever to suppress any investigation into the “sacred marriage.” (The more I read about it, the more I imagined to be sort of like combining matter and antimatter to create pure energy.) To keep the knowledge from falling into the wrong hands, the steps and ingredients—the recipe—for marrying the male and female principles were encoded in alchemical ciphers, like the athame and the chalice. The old Taoist sorcerers were apparently the real masters—mixing yin and yang and all that—which is why there are so many immortal sages in Chinese mythology. The famous Eight Immortals, for example, who each rode a dragon and whose tiny fat statues now adorn pretty much any Chinese restaurant anywhere.
Only nobody knew how to do it anymore.
Several hours later, just before midnight, I left my apartment as instructed and took the train west from Penn Station.
People who grow up in sensible Western towns might not get it, but most of the old cities of the world have lots of places that aren’t on Google. Some are ephemeral, like the underground venue I used to frequent in college. Others are secret, including clubs and fraternities like Maleficium. Growing up in Hong Kong, such places were just part of life. Maps were for tourists and businessmen. The rest of us knew where we needed to go. The on-again, off-again street market where I often bought vegetables for my grandmother’s restaurant had no regular stock, no regular hours, no office or phone number, no law, and no place to leave an angry review if you got cheated or they didn’t have the kind of fish you wanted. It made sense to me that there would still be at least one place like that left in New York.
Fish’s instructions weren’t so much directions as a riddle. Leave at midnight. Find the busiest crossroads. The Row would be underneath.
I found the crossroads easy enough, right on the MTA website, with traffic data updated in real time. The busiest crossroads is an interchange, a meeting a several major highways, even though we don’t tend to think of it that way. Getting to the space underneath it was considerably more difficult. It wasn’t meant to be approached by the public, which meant it wasn’t on any public map.
Having been forced to read Moby Dick in my obligatory English class, I recalled a line.
“It is not down on any map,” I recited loudly, as if it might open a door. “True places never are.”
Eventually, I noticed a line of train tracks, which I figured had to pass right by my destination at a tangent. My Keds didn’t have much tread and I nearly fell trying to navigate the grassy slope to the tracks. But the tracks themselves were flat and empty, and there was enough of a gap at the side that I didn’t have to walk on them. As I approached the interchange, I saw an opening in the foliage near a drainage gully that revealed a chain link fence. I had to follow the fence for fifteen or twenty meters before I found a broken gap large enough to fit me. Squeezing through felt like wriggling through a hole in the world. Giant concrete pillars kept the overpasses aloft. They were so large as to seem otherworldly, as if a giant hand had lifted the city like a carpet and exposed the grit underneath. The whole place was a void, a non-space, erased by the freeway overhead. With no easy access, no place for signage, and certainly no visibility from the passing cars, it was a remainder, a gap, an urban spandrel. Cracked and uneven concrete poked through a thin layer of dirt and gravel. Rubbish was strewn about, blown in from the city.
Gathered at the center of the space was the oddest collection of vehicles I had ever seen. They were scattered amid the columns and looked like the back side of a carnival. I saw numerous RVs, buses, and trucks clustered around two long rows of smaller vehicles, including a school bus and a hearse. Christmas lights were strung back and forth across the rows and provided most of the illumination. The rest came from several fires that burned in metal trash cans. Rebuilt cars, mostly boat-sized jalopies, were parked side-by-side with their trunks exposed. Out of those trunks and from car-side tents was sold the detritus of civilization. There was nothing you could buy at a normal store and everything you couldn’t. A huge, sweaty woman in a flower-print muumuu and more hair than I had ever seen sold mounds of it, overflowing from cardboard boxes. It was gathered from the floors and trash bins of a hundred salons and sorted by shape and color. Another guy sold used utensils—knives, plastic forks, those bendy cafeteria spoons, and the rest. They protruded from fast-food cups or rested in discarded silverware trays. Many were labeled, bound with a ragged slip of paper indicating the age and gender of the diner and the date, as if some homeless person had been watching people eat so they could recover their trash later. There were vials and twisty-sealed baggies with labels like thallium, juniper, and riddlewort. There were empty bottles, old sports equipment, plastic fish, broken toys that looked like they were taken right out of the home, and on and on.
The first person to notice me stepped out of a silver-sided trailer. He looked like a LARPer. He wore heavy laced combat boots into which he’d stuffed the pant legs of his dark jeans. His shirt had ruffles down the front, like he was a pirate. His arms and neck were tattooed, and he had long hair. He sold knives and edged weapons. He eyed me skeptically. I smiled. But when I approached him to ask for directions, he stepped back into his trailer and slammed the door. The same thing happened at the next open stall, where a very colorful woman in a homemade felt dress and flowers in her hair did the same. She was also tattooed—with identical heraldry on each round arm. I saw cages of carrier pigeons behind her RV.
The ambient chatter dropped as I was noticed. A couple shoppers fled. One seller started packing, as if my appearance had ruined the whole market.
I stopped in the very middle of the row amid the retreating crowd. “I’m not leaving!” I announced to all who could hear.
“Why are you yelling?” an older woman barked at me from inside her tent. Then she saw me. “Oh,” she said, like she knew who I was.
She turned back to her stall, which was stuffed with dried herbs and powders. They hung from the top in bunches and erupted from wood crates and spilled from mounds in large burlap sacks with the lips turned down. She was slower than the knife-seller, however, and I got to her before she could shut the sliding door of her conversion van.
“What do you want?” she snapped, as if she’d already told me three times to go away.
“What is this place?”
“What does it look like?”
I made a face. I wasn’t sure how to answer that. I knew exactly what it looked like. Believing it was still a little hard.
While I struggled with a reply, the old woman tried to escape.
“Wait a second,” I called. “I’m looking for someone.” I held up the photo of Lily and her ex. “I was told I could find him here.”
She scowled even deeper when she saw it. Her wrinkled face bunched like a Muppet.
“Oh,” she drolled. “That one.”
“Do you know him? Is he here?”
“If I tell you, will you scram?”
“Well . . .” I had to think for a moment. “Yes.”
“And never come back?”
She was serious.
“If he’s really here and I can talk to him, I suppose so. Sure.”
She stepped forward excitedly as her face lit up. “Really?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes. Fine. Whatever.”
She spit into the palm of her fingerless glove and thrust it out. “Deal!”
I looked at it.
“Well,” she urged. “Go on. You can’t back out now.”
I held her fingers loosely and shook.
“Done,” she said. “He’s in the school bus.” She waved. “With the gin girl.”
At least, that’s what it sounded like.
“Dangerous,” she called after me. “Keeping one of them. Not that anyone asked me.”
The old yellow school bus was parked away from the rest, as if it wasn’t trusted. It had mismatched tires and covered windows. I walked around to the door, which was open. I knocked, but there was no answer, and I walked up the steps.
The interior had been completely gutted and turned into a living space—of sorts. Dim light came from the window at the back which looked out over the Row. Around it were stacks of boxes—contraband, it seemed, probably taken off the back of a delivery truck—along with quite a few plastic-wrapped hookahs. Old assemble-it-yourself bookshelves had been bolted to the walls in several places so they wouldn’t shift when the bus was in motion. Plastic milk crates held clothes and memorabilia. There was a mattress on the floor, stacked high with blankets, next to a hot plate whose cord snaked away to a hidden plug.
Near the front was a lidless cardboard box full of leaning LPs and I stepped in to examine them. I couldn’t help it. They were unopened.
“Love Like Blood,” a man said behind me.
It was the boy from the photo, tattoos and all.
“The Killing Joke,” he said. “1985.”
It was a first press, completely mint.
“Sorry, I—”
“It’s okay,” he said, motioning to the stairs. “Door’s always open.”
He was in sweatpants. Other than that, he was barefoot and shirtless. I could see the tattoo of the church that covered his abdomen. Definitely had a Russian prison vibe. The spire rose between his pects, which sported a sun on one side and a crescent moon on the other. His shoulders and forearms were spotted with various objects and icons: a leaping dolphin, a dripping flask, an eye, a tree, a five-pointed star, a laughing head, a raven in flames, and so on.
I turned and replaced the album.
“I take it you’re into old music?” he said, standing right behind me.
“Something like that.”
“See anything you like?”
“None of these have been opened.”
“Of course not. You don’t collect records to play them.”
“Says who?”
“The needle wears down the grooves, slowly but surely.”
He lifted another album from the set. Neil Diamond. Touching You, Touching Me.
“Nice,” I said with a laugh.
I looked at his hands. All ten of his fingers sported a different ring. I saw a turquoise band and a silver skull and yellow plastic with a green gem, like he’d gotten it out of a cereal box or one of those toy dispensers at the grocery store.
“Each play is a tiny act of destruction,” he said. “That’s why people like vinyl.”
“I thought it was the superior sound quality.”
“Whatever,” he scoffed, gripping the record. “This is a living thing. It gets born, grows old, and dies.”
He put the vinyl back carefully. He smiled down at me, genuinely. “I’m Bastien.” His voice was soft and warm. “And you are?”
God, he was gorgeous.
Okay, since we’re being honest, women are at least as hung up on appearance as guys. And he had it. All of it. The stylishly messy hair that hung in front of his smoky eyes. The chiseled jaw. The lean abs with the line of thin hairs between that led your eyes straight down. He was tall but not so tall I’d need a stepladder to kiss him, stylish but not obsessed with it, confident without being completely cocky. He was the guy every girl in the room wished would notice her, if not for a night of carnal desire, then at least for the selfish pleasure of shooting him down.
“Cerise,” I said. My voice wavered and I cleared my throat. “Cerise,” I repeated confidently.
“Is there any particular reason you broke into my place?”
He was sporting the faintest beginnings of a Tony Stark ’stache. I wasn’t sure about that. He wandered close enough that I could tell there was nothing under his sweatpants but his naked body.
I stepped away. “I thought we established the door was always open.”
He smirked. “Doesn’t mean you had to come inside. Let’s find out, shall we?”
He picked up a tarot deck that rested on a stack of boxes. The flaps were folded over the top, but there was a gap, and I could see vials. They were just like the potions Fish had showed me, but these were empty. The glass clinked as Bastien plopped down on an old seat cushion on the floor, next to the hot plate, jerking his head to move his hair out of his eyes. He cut the deck in two, and with one deft move, he spread the entire deck out on the floor.
“Pick a card.”
I crouched and looked. It was the same deck as the card I had found—tattered and browned. I was thinking whether or not I should tell him about it when he said “Nononono” and swiped the cards up and started shuffling again.
“What?”
“That’s not how you do it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t think. Close your eyes.”
I did, and I heard him spread the cards on the floor again.
“Now, relax. And when you open your eyes, listen to the little voice. It’ll take you right to a card.”
“Oka—”
“Wait.” He put his ringed fingers to my eyes. “I’m serious. Don’t think about it. Just go right for the first one.”
“I got it,” I objected.
He took his hand away and I opened my eyes and went right for the first card I noticed.
“Okay?” I asked him, my hand resting on it.
He nodded and I turned it and set it down.
“The Seven of Pentacles,” he said. “Reversed.”
“Am I supposed to know what that means?”
He held it up to explain it to me. “A man with a hoe admires the harvest he’s just reaped. He’s tired, but months of hard work have paid off. If the card were drawn upright, it would mean success through perseverance and long-term planning. But reversed . . .” He tsk-tsked and put the card back.
“Whatever. That would apply to, like, 99% of the population.”
“Very Occupy of you.”
“What about you?” I asked.
He studied me while his ring-covered fingers deftly maneuvered the tarot deck like a stage magician. I couldn’t tell you how he did it, but he drew a card from the middle of the deck with one hand. He cut it with his thumb and kept both halves propped between his fingers, twisting them around such that as they came together, his thumb pushed a single card free, which he snatched with his other hand.
The Seven of Wands, upright. A man on a ridge held up a staff as six others jabbed at him from below. He braced himself, legs wide, and there was a stern look on his face, as if he were defending his high position from many enemies. Interestingly, his shoes didn’t match.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“You don’t want to guess?” he slipped the card back into the deck.
“Both sevens,” I said.
“That significant?” he asked coyly.
I met his eyes then—all smoky and gorgeous.
“I dunno. Seemed like a funny coincidence, I guess.”
“They always are, aren’t they?” He started shuffling the deck again in that fancy one-handed way. “Sorta like you showing up here today.”
“Something special about it?” I asked.
Resting in boxes here and there was the oddest assortment of bric-a-brac I’d ever seen. It looked like he’d robbed an estate sale. Several of them, actually. I saw a brass oil lamp on the floor in the corner. I thought it was another hookah at first because it had a similar shape, with a long, fluted neck, but up close I could see the reservoir and the wick poking from the lip at the top. It looked like a giraffe sticking out its tongue. I put my hand on it so I could tilt it and see the crisscrossed carvings, but Bastien raised a hand.
“Ehh. Better not touch that.”
I pulled away, but it was too late. My hand had already touched the lid, which was on a hinge. It had opened slightly, and it fell with a clink.
“Carrier pigeons and whale oil lamps . . .” I muttered. “So?” I asked, louder. “What’s special about today?”
“Not the day. You.”
“Me?” I stood straight. None of this was supposed to have anything to do with me. “What about me?”
“You used to hang at the Couch,” he asked, “didn’t you?”
My mouth hung open. Then I shut it. It was a trick, I was sure, like something a stage magician would do. I had given it away somehow. I looked down to examine myself.
He laughed. “Nothing like that. I saw you there, that’s all.”
“They closed it down over a year ago.”
“Oh, really? That’s too bad. That place was great.”
The Couch was an abandoned factory with a giant fence-lined lot crisscrossed in weeds. Facing the lot was a high loading dock which served as a wonderful summer stage. There was even a large overhang to keep the rain off. It was perfect, not least because there was no way the cops could sneak up on the place, and no way they could stop anyone from running even if they did. It was just too big.
Years before, someone had dumped a ratty old brown couch in the lot, which was the only furniture, so that became the meeting spot. One day, someone brought a corncob pipe in lieu of a bong as a total joke and the name stuck.
“You expect me to believe you remembered me after all this time?”
He frowned. “I guess not.”
Things got quiet, and I glanced away to avoid his gaze. I noticed a short stack of books on a bottom shelf, but not just books—old books. Two were bound in thick expensive leather. I walked over to them and lifted the first. It had a velvet inlay on the cover on which was pressed the title in gold lettering.
“Ogrosticon Orduum?” I asked.
I ran my fingers over the fabric, which was matted with age.
“The ancient art of duplicity and misdirection,” he said. “The illusionist’s Bible.”
I picked up the next one, which was much thinner and had a plain blue cover.
“The Key of Solomon.”
“In Latin,” he warned.
“So it is.” I shut it.
“There’s also Smales’s grimoire of lost relics. And The Complete Enchanter. The real one. And volume six of the Reign by Massius Crane, the unredacted copy that includes his monologue on the rediscovery of the Necronomion and the start of the war. Very hard to find.”
He said all of that with a slight smile, knowing full well I wouldn’t get any of it.
“So where did you get it?” I asked, bending to examine the rest of the stack.
“You know. Around.”
“Stolen?” I asked.
“Ah,” he said. “But from where?”
“Dude, I’ve been to every bookstore in the city. Used books. Comic shops. Rare books. No way I missed a place.”
“You missed the best place.”
“What? It’s like a secret or something?”
“No more than here.”
I thought about Fish’s words. Lotsa things in this city, if you know how to look.
He smiled. He was playing with me.
I bent to pick up the third book to get at the fourth, which poked out just enough to reveal an ornate cover that I wanted to see, but the Ogrosticon fell from my arms and hit the floor. Bastien grimaced and jumped up to take the books from my hand. I must’ve flinched a little at his touch because his ringed fingers stopped and held me gently.
“You’re touching me,” I said. I don’t know that I meant to say it. It just came out.
“Is that a problem?”
I pulled back and my hair fell in front of my face.
“Sorry,” I said, fixing the books into a stack.
Bastien stood. “Where is she?”
“Sorry?”
“Don’t say sorry. Say where she is. Or are you going to pretend that’s not her very expensive handbag you’re carrying?”
Caught.
I was crouched with my hands on the books still. I looked down and opened my mouth to say sorry again and stopped.
“Did that cretin in the wheelchair send you?”
“No.”
“Don’t lie!”
“Whoa, dude. Calm down. Fine. Yes. He asked me to find her. He’s worried about his kid.”
He scowled. “Kid?”
“Yeah. You know, like what happens at the end of pregnancy.”
“Pregnancy?”
Shit.
“She’s not pregnant,” he declared.
“Hey, man. I saw the boxes.”
“What boxes?”
“Bastien?” a young woman asked—the one under the covers that I hadn’t even noticed. She pulled the blanket off her head and squinted in confusion. “What’s going on?”
She had dark African skin and perfectly symmetrical C cups with playfully perky nipples. Her head was shaved and she wore absolutely nothing but an old leather dog collar around her neck.
A dog collar.
“Shit,” he cursed and looked down.
“Who’re you?” she asked me.
She had a British accent. She didn’t seem upset, just curious, like she expected I was there to deliver a pizza or something.
“WOW . . .” I snorted. “Totally broken up about your ex, I see.”
I used it as an excuse to leave, but he stepped in front of me.
“Don’t pay any attention to her.”
The girl in the bed was smiling wryly, like she was enjoying watching him squirm.
“That’s just Irfan. She’s my fam—” He froze. “Family,” he said. “She’s like family.”
“Family?” I looked at her dark-skinned breasts. “Your adopted African sister who sleeps with you in the nude? Please.” I rolled my eyes and tried to push past.
He stopped me again. “I’m looking for her, too. She’s in trouble, isn’t she? We could work together. Are you hungry? You wanna grab something?”
It was awkward, like all his charm had suddenly worn off.
Someone screamed then, a woman, followed immediately by a man. There was a ruckus. I heard people running past the bus amid the rumble of multiple starting engines. Footsteps pounded on gravel and dry grass. A man stopped at the door. He looked a lot like Bastien. A brother maybe.
“They found us,” he said.
“How—”
Everyone stopped and looked at me, including Irfan.
“What?” I asked, innocent.
“You need to go,” Bastien told me.
“I was trying to!” I objected.
I started down the steps again but he grabbed me and pulled me so hard I fell.
“Hey!”
“It’s too late now,” he said, swinging the door shut and starting the engine. Or at least, he tried to. The old bus sputtered impotently.
Something he saw out the windshield had clearly spooked him, but from where I was on the floor, I couldn’t see.
“Come on . . .” He urged, trying again.
Two jalopies and an RV passed.
“They’re ignoring the others,” Irfan said flatly, her eyes into space.
I noticed her eyes then. They weren’t brown. They were lavender, like she had colored lenses.
“They’re coming here,” she warned.
“How does she know that?”
The engine sputtered a third time and then rumbled to life. Bastien put the bus into gear, and I heard a grinding noise from underneath. As we pulled away, something hard and sharp scratched along the side of the bus. I stood to see what was going on, but the rigid bus bounced over divots and potholes on its flight, sending anything that wasn’t nailed down to the floor, including me. Irfan spilled from the mattress. She was, as I expected, completely naked—except for the collar. She smirked.
We didn’t stop or even slow until we were far away. Finally, Bastien stopped the bus with a squeal and opened the door.
“Get out,” he said.