Kelley found it hard to pay attention to his meeting with Herbert. Just swirled his coffee mug and replayed in his head the argument he had with his mother that morning.
“Glycine, l-theanine, niacin, nigella sativa, lion’s mane, trans-resveratrol. You don’t even know what half this stuff does. No offense, but you look like shit!”
“I run every day, Kelley. I do not ‘look like shit.’”
“Just eat something, please.”
“I don’t need all those toxins and additives. I get more than enough nutrition from my regimen, thank you very much.”
“Mom,” he pleaded. He hardly ever called her mom.
“This conversation is over. I have pilates in an hour.”
Hebert smacked the table, jolting him back to the present. The cafe warmed back into view.
“Hm?” said Kelley, straightening up as if caught sleeping in class. Not that he ever went long enough to fall asleep.
“You’re not listening to me,” said Herbert. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh, I was just thinking about the jewelry box. It was the only thing I took that night. And I lost it.”
“So what, we’ll get a million more. Get with the program here.”
The atmosphere in the cafe was dismal. Something had gone wrong with the speakers. Every table at the mercy of everyone else’s conversation. The perfect time to discuss burglary.
“So, I was thinking. Houses might be a little pedestrian.”
“What are you talking about? So far we’ve…” Kelley chose his words carefully. “We visited one. And it was a complete failure.”
“It wasn’t planned, that’s why. We didn’t even know each other yet.”
“So what’s your idea?”
“Picture this,” Hebert waved his hands. “We go and visit a chemical factory.”
“You’re out of your mind,” whispered Kelley, his face like sour milk. “Do you know how tight the sec-,” He rolled his eyes when he saw Hebert shaking his head. “There’s a lot of people there, alright. I have anxiety. I hate being watched. Whenever I visit anywhere, I prefer to visit a nice house, because often we’re the only guests. I almost got scolded last time. I’m not looking to get scolded again.”
“It might be worth a shot, is all I’m saying,” said Hebert. “There’s a plant not too far out of the city. They’ve got some great stuff.”
“Worth a shot, fuck you. You just want this shit for your experiments,” Kelley hissed. “What do I get out of it?”
“Sell it,” Hebert snapped back, leaning over the table.
“To who? You?”
“Would you like a top-up?” asked the waitress. Herbert cleared his throat. Kelley smiled politely, his squinted eyes still visibly annoyed.
“No thank you.”
They sat in silence for a while. Pushed back chairs sounded like bombs going off. The couple beside them quietly discussed dinner plans. Every dull detail as audible as if it were directed towards them. Herbert poured another sugar packet into his beige colored coffee. Kelley rested his cheek on his fist and stared out the window.
“Do you believe in reincarnation?” he asked.
Herbert took a sip of his coffee.
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Just curious.”
Feeling like a bug landed on his neck, Kelley turned. He caught Herbert eyeing him suspiciously.
“Stop that.”
“I’m thinking.”
“I hate it.”
“Reincarnation,” said Herbert, tapping his finger. “It doesn’t really make any sense, does it? The human population grows larger every year. Who are these new people? They can’t all be reincarnated.”
Kelley shrugged, “Maybe they’re fresh souls. A soul’s got to start out somewhere.”
“You don’t believe in this, do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s nothing but superstition. I think in some places it was a useful idea, like God or money or Santa Claus, but that doesn’t make any of it real. It’s like in The Great Gatsby. The eyes of TJ Eckleburg. Have you ever read it? You must have. I think I had to read it four times in High School.”
“I don’t read.”
“You don’t read?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“You’re messing with me.”
Kelley broke eye contact, staring at the table. Annoyed.
“What was your point?”
“Okay, well, so in The Great Gatsby, there’s this billboard for an optometrist. And it’s just a pair of eyes looking out over the desert. It’s a metaphor, you see? The eyes are divine judgment. Even though it’s just paint, the people who see it feel like they’re being watched. And when people are being watched, they’re on their best behavior. So you want people to assume they’re being watched, even if they’re not. I bet reincarnation is a lot like that. If you think you’ve already been here, done that, why bother? Are you really going to get peer pressured into smoking crack? You probably already did crack in a past life.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“You don’t even read.”
“I don’t have to read to know that all fiction is lies from some random retard. I don’t care if it’s spaceships or leprechauns or your Great Gazoo.”
“The Great Gatsby represents a very real aspect of 1920s New York,” said Hebert, “The culture, the dress. Not to mention the dynamic between old and new money caused by the bootlegging industry.”
“The day someone spills blood on the altar of Gatsby, you let me know.”
Hebert couldn’t help but smile, reminded as he was of their rooftop conversation.
“You have a high bar for literature.”
Looking out the window, Kelley tapped his finger on the table, more annoyed than ever.
“I just don’t like wasting my time.”
At that moment, a couple ‘free coffee’ coupons were slapped on the table. They had to leave. Their apologetic waitress explained. It wasn’t her. There had been complaints.
“I can’t believe you got us kicked out,” laughed Kelley, kicking a stone into an intersection, barely missing a rat who scrambled into the coffee cup of a sleeping dope addict, his bottom lip lax like a stretched piece of taffy. Dried blood speckled his cardboard mat. It really had been a massacre. Kelley shoved five bucks under his blanket.
“I didn’t think we were that loud,” said Herbert, adjusting his glasses. “It was probably the talk about ‘blood’ and ‘altars’. People are a little on edge after last week. But I suppose you didn’t read about that either.”
“I had a friend tell me about it.”
“Horrible.”
“What happened with that? They caught him?”
“No,” said Hebert. “They didn’t catch him. He cut his own head off.”
“I seen him!” The dope addict’s head bobbed up. He grabbed his cup and shook it, frazzled rat flipping about like a hairy pancake. A piss blot formed around the crotch of his sweatpants, trailing and trickling down one leg and into his shoe.
Gooseflesh ran down Kelley’s back.
“In his red dress, I seen him. He’s back from the dead. I seen him!”
A dead pair of purple eyes flashed in Kelley’s head. When he told Helen about primitive forces knocking on reality’s door, he didn’t think it would be her.
The addict’s head dropped down.
“Cannibal,” he muttered to himself with limp lips. “Cannibal, cannibal.”
“No kidding,” whispered Kelley.
“Hey, get out of there!”
Hebert jutted forward, grasping at something behind his back like some melodramatic Julius Caesar. A kid, maybe eight or nine, spun around his legs and took off. Kelley spotted a wallet in his tiny fist. Classic.
“Thief!” shouted Hebert, shaking his fist.
“Wait here,” said Kelley, already starting to chase the kid down the street. “I’ll get it back!”
As he closed behind him, the boy tipped over a garbage bin and stole into a narrow alley. He didn’t do bad for having such tiny legs. Right behind him, Kelley scaled the fence at the alley’s end and turned the corner.
No fucking way.
Between two construction dumps was a small building around the size of a laundromat. Above the door, a statue of a screaming woman, a snake coiled around her head. It was a face that kept following him everywhere. But at least he had a name now.
Babalon.
Kelley looked around. He could have sworn there used to be a strip mall around here.
Before he had a chance to explore, the door opened and a sickly thin woman stumbled out in a red dress. Legs shaking, she dipped and weaved trepidatiously through the rebar maze. Hitting the sidewalk she tripped and fell like bridge trusses held together with bubble gum. One leg bent backwards.
“Jesus,” Kelley started towards her. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” she said dreamily. She rolled to her side, coiling in the fetal position to pop her leg back in place. “It does that sometimes.”
He offered his hand, but she ignored it. She raised herself up slowly then stumbled away, her leg occasionally twitching.
Weird lady.
Climbing into the rebar jungle, Kelley cautiously approached the door. He reached for the handle.
Locked.
He banged his fist on the door.
No one answered. So he banged harder.
“We are not accepting any visitors at this time,” said a voice from inside.
“Give me back my friend’s wallet you asshole!”
Nothing. Great, now they were ignoring him.
He glanced down at the keyhole. He recognized the lock instantly. A cheap piece of shit. It wouldn’t be hard to open. Absolutely spoiled for discardent pieces of metal in the junk heap, Kelley easily bent together a make-shift lock pick.
Slide it. Easy does it. Carry the thread. Click. Boom.
The door opened with a gentle push. It really was a shitty lock. He usually never got it on the first go. He overheard someone on the other side say, in a high, nasal voice –That’s right, baby. This nut isn’t just jizzum. It’s sacrament.
Something about the way the guy said it made his stomach turn.
Sickeningly dense incense curled like smoke throughout the room. Air so thick you could pass a knife through it. Countless ceramic jars decorated with small hand prints ran the perimeters. Several paintings of gods and devils lined the walls.
Besides the paintings, the interior was sparsely decorated. Aisles of folded chairs made up imitation pews. A podium stood at the end. On a table next to a wall covered in slashes was a glass jar marked “donations.” There couldn’t have been more than twenty dollars. He heard Old Crow’s voice in his head.
If you want someone to stop looking for money, make them think they’ve found it.
There was cash around. Plenty of it. He could just tell. Just from the way the room was arranged.
Five people stood around the chairs in the middle of the room, huddled as though strategizing about how best to toss a football. Two men and three women. All five were wearing the same drab, red dress. Hiding behind them, the kid that took Herbert’s wallet. When he spotted Kelley, he tugged on one of the guy’s dresses. A middle-aged man with long, dirty-blonde hair raised his head, staring at Kelley with husky eyes and a negative canthal tilt.
“Hey you!” he called. Nasal voiced. It had been him that made the sacrament comment. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”
Kelley shrugged, “The door was unlocked.”
The man’s eyes narrowed.
“What’s that on your wrist?”
Instinctively, Kelley shucked his jacket sleeve loose.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know that mark,” he said.
“Hey, what sign are you?” interrupted a freckled woman in pigtails. She was nearly as thin as the woman he had met outside.
“The one that thinks people who identify with their astrological sign need to be lined up against a wall and shot.”
She gave him a look like he had just pissed in her porridge.
“Well you might be the wrong kind of person for this place,” said husky eyes. “The Aquarian Age is on the horizon. If you don’t know who you are and with who you stand, I don’t know if you’ll be able to survive the tide.”
“I thought it already happened,” said Kelley. “Isn’t that what that disco song was about?” He held his hands behind his back as he strolled lackadaisical, pretending to take in the art. He spotted the hint of a money band taped to the back of the radiator. Well, that was the first stop. He fumbled it up his sleeve without much trouble. Crisp bills. Very nice.
“We’ve been in transition for at least 50 years,” the man replied. “It’s a slow process. Too slow. We’ll die before we see anything happen. So we’re here to speed things up. We offer our strength to Babalon, the goddess who destroys the old ways and paves way for the new.”
Next to the entrance to the building, he noticed a slight discoloration of the wall in the shape of a brick. Another hiding spot. Maybe. He’d check it on the way out. He kept walking around, his heel looking for a loose floorboard or two.
“How do you know she does that?”
“I met her in a dream. Before her, I lived in nightmares. Life had no purpose. It was gray, dull, meaningless. She tore me out of that dark hole I had crawled into like a great fire leading me through the void. I close my eyes and I see her ripping through the great tarantula of modernity with her fist, tearing away the web of filth and lies we’ve been fed since we were born. That’s why I am her priest. We all are. In the ancient language, Cain means ‘priest’. And so I call myself Caina-Babalon. But that is just my title. Please, call me Tsuni.”
“That’s interesting,” said Kelley, looking up at a painting of a red-skinned woman holding her own decapitated head. She was fully nude, save for a necklace of skulls. Blood squirted from her neck, feeding two pendulum-titted ogresses on either side. Chhinnamasta. The wall was a little scuffed where it met the painting frame. There was definitely something behind it.
“I once met someone in a dream too. A long time ago,” he added. A piece of wood give way a little under his heel. He leant down in front of it then sat cross-legged. He felt the attention on him. Good. It would be easier that way.
“He called himself Cain-Abel. He wore this featureless, white mask. In my dream, he asked me to do him a favor. Behind the mask, he said, was nothing but ravenous hunger. He could eat all there was to be eaten in dreams and in death and in the waking world alike, and he still wouldn’t be satisfied.”
Heavily narrating with his hands, he drew one back and surreptitiously popped open the floorboard behind him.
“So you can imagine, Cain-Abel wanted more. He knew his future, and he didn’t care for it. ‘Draw me a face,’ he said. ‘So I can be something else.’ He said one day he would be free from his priesthood, unshackled from his chains. And on that day, he would finally be able to choose his own fate. He could live amongst the living. I wonder if he hasn’t already. But the thing is, I’ve never heard of Cain being the word for priest. Not in any language. I only ever heard it from him.”
Kelley pretended to stretch back, sliding the floorboard back in place. Lump of cash curled neatly in a sweater fold. When he stood up, he would maneuver it into the band of his underwear.
“And so I gotta ask, who is it you’re really worshiping? Are you Caina-Babalon or Cain-Cain-Abel? Have you been tricked? Who are you really helping?”
Tsuni smirked. His twitching finger revealed his excitement.
“Did you draw him a face?” asked pigtails. She had been enthralled by the story. God, Kelley thought. Her cheekbones could cut glass.
“Forget that,” said Tsuni, telling her with his hands to shush. “Let’s talk alone, you and me,” He winked at his fellow priests. “Please, let’s call this meeting adjourned.”
“I want my friend’s wallet,” said Kelley.
Tsuni glared at the child hiding behind another anorexic woman. He cowered under the attention.
“Give him the wallet, Billie.”
The boy took it from his coat and held it out gingerly in front of him.
“Thanks,” said Kelley. He smiled at Billie. “That was a good heist. You waited for the right distraction. Your timing was perfect.”
The kid looked away. A burly looking man with a face like tenderized pork grabbed him by the shoulder and into another room. The other three women followed him. Tsuni led Kelley down a thin hallway past the main pulpit.
The moment he stepped into Tsuni’s office, he exploded.
“What was that you were saying about sacrament? You shouldn’t talk like that in front of a kid.”
“You heard that, did you? Don’t worry, he doesn’t understand any of it. We like to talk freely amongst ourselves.”
“You’re going to mess him up. He already looks scared to death of you.”
Tsuni leant in, a big shit-eating-grin on his face.
“I’ll let you in on a bit of a secret. Have you heard of garrote?”
“No.”
“Take a seat.”
Kelley slumped down into an uncomfortable bean bag chair. Pellets felt like they were made of bullets. Leaning over in his office chair, Tsuni sat significantly higher.
“Garrote is the energy people give off when they feel strong emotions. And it’s the most potent energy in the world. Children…well, children are very good at producing high levels of garrote. We have rooms where we go and scare them, but it’s not real. It’s just a ritual for the purpose of harvesting garrote. No one’s hurting them. And we never would. They’re like family.”
“Like family?”
“Only a few Cains have children of their own. The rest we collect from orphanages.”
Kelley nodded.
“You’re really making me want to burn this place down.”
“This place is a refuge,” said Tsuni. “Look outside. Don’t you think things are getting a little crazier out there? When the walls come down and Babalon returns to usher in the great moontide, this is the place you want to be. Where do you think that kid’s going to go if you burn down his home? Back to the orphanage? Or are you going to feed him?”
“And where are you meant to store something like garrote? How do you gather emotional energy?”
“We have jars.”
“Jars.”
“And when Babalon returns from the underworld, we will offer them to her.”
“I see.”
“You need to understand the reality of the situation. The apocalypse is coming. Billions will die. But it’s not the same for everybody. For us, it’s the start of something new. And I do mean, ‘us’. I see a little fire in your eyes. I know you were meant for the new world.”
“Really?” said Kelley earnestly. “Me?”
“Of course. The moment you brought up Cain-Abel, I knew. You’re one of us. I’ve seen him in dreams too. He told me about you. He said I should expect you. So, no, I am not fooled by anyone. I know who he is. He walks with Babalon.”
“I’ve never felt like I was a part of something before.”
“Well now you can be.”
“Just one question–you said you recognized the mark on my wrist. What is it?”
Tsuni looked perplexed.
“It’s the mark of the moon of course,” he said with a smile. “Are you testing me? You really are a sly dog.”
Worthless. So he didn’t know Philip’s real name either.
“Yeah, but you guessed right,” said Kelley, feigning his own smile. “Well, I’ll think about your offer. But I have to get back to my friend.”
He lifted the wallet.
“I only really came to get this.”
“Of course. But please, tell me your name.”
“Philip.”
“It was a pleasure to meet you, Philip. I hope we can all see you soon. The child that stole your friend’s wallet, Billie, seems quite fond of you already. And remember, the moon’s tide brings Aquarian waters.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
Moments after Kelley left his office, Tsuni jumped at the sound of breaking ceramic. He ran out to see shards of clay scattered everywhere. The porchetta-faced man stood in the middle of the mayhem. Eyes bugging out. He looked like was going to puke.
“I’m sorry,” laughed Tsuni, walking up and slapping him on the back, “This is my fault. I misjudged the kid. I told him we fill the jars with garrote. I didn’t think he’d get so upset.”
He tickled the man’s ribs. “Hey, come on. There was nothing in them. Why are you looking so glum?”
“It’s not the jars,” said the man. “He took our money.”
Tsuni stared in disbelief at the brick-shaped discoloration of wall near the entrance, where he knew there was nothing but a mouse trap an arm’s breadth away. Completely untouched. He hadn’t expected anyone to rob them, but if anyone was going to, he hadn’t expected them to ignore the decoy. Had it really been that obvious?
“How much?”
Sitting at an empty bus stop, Kelley discreetly counted the bills under the cover of his jacket. Blue light blared from the advertisement behind him. It got dark so early those days.
He felt grimy after being in that place. He thought about reaching out to Helen. She always had a positive effect on his mood. Even when she annoyed him. Maybe especially then.
He didn’t even really want to do anything, just sit around with her. Go for a burger. Maybe see a movie after. Ketchup powdered popcorn and Coca-Cola, no ice. That was what she liked. He didn’t need it, but he would still eat half.
He paused in thought. Was he lonely or hungry?
And then he felt snakes writhing up and down his body and white eyes staring into his back.
He went into his phone and deleted the last two messages Helen sent him. There was nothing he could say to her until his business was finished. He thought briefly of January, his own stretched face staring back at him.
Out of the frying pan into the fire.
Oh well. It can’t get any worse, he laughed like an idiot to himself, knowing full well that it could.
He glanced at Herbert’s wallet in his hand. It did feel like a win. And it was kind of like a good deed. Maybe offset by the stolen twenty grand in his pockets, but he couldn’t say he cared for the people he took it from. He shot Herbert a text. Five minutes later, he got a reply– I owe you one. You want to get noodles? My treat.
No. It wasn’t Helen. But it would do.
Noodles, though. What a cheap bastard.