The War Against the Assholes Read online

  “Listen,” said Alabama, “don’t take this the wrong way but do you want to come back to my house.” I nodded. I didn’t want to be alone. A rain-and-hail combo started as we walked. “It’s not far,” she said. I didn’t mind the weather. It was clearing my head. We walked west. Rain glittered in her hair. Hail fragments glittered in her eyelashes, in the yellow street light. She lived in an actual house on Perry Street: Old brick, three stories. Ivy and tall windows. Her parents had inherited it from her great-uncle Avery, who died without children. When we got there, her parents ambushed us in the living room. Mark and Lena Sturdivant. I asked them what they did for a living. That was my single conversational opener with adults. They both claimed to be artists. Alabama rolled her eyes as they spoke. “We’re going upstairs,” she said. “Do you need tea,” said her father. “No, I think we’re okay,” said Alabama.

  I’d never been in a house in the city before. Floor-to-floor stairs: new. At their top, a long, dim hallway. Black-and-white photographs on the walls. A wagon wheel in a tangle of grass. The evil, cronish face of a hen, in close-up. “They’re just rich people,” Alabama said, “on both sides. I don’t know why they tell everyone they’re artists. My father painted when he was in college. My mother used to perform these weird plays. It’s not art.” She hurled herself onto her bed. Huge and white. I rocked in a rocking chair, cutting a deck of cards one-handed. To relax. There wasn’t much to say. Hail beat the windows. Alabama wore a gray sweater that reached her knees. It made her look younger and bonier. Her parents’ laughter drifted up: explosive, hollow. Her mother was far less beautiful than I’d expected, her tear-shaped, lightly prognathous face framed by dull, dull hair. I’d been reasoning from Alabama’s appearance. She looked exactly like her father: same jaw, same long eyes. She was taking a year between high school and college. “They were totally for it,” she said, “for my exploring. It was really disgusting.” She told me she’d met Charthouse during her last year at Brock Hall. He’d come to their college fair, as an alumnus of Columbia. “He’s an electrical engineer,” she said, “I mean I had no idea what he was talking about but he showed us this generator. We all held hands. Our hair stood up. He said that’s what Columbia would be like. It was so absurd. Then we got to talking. He asked me all these questions. He gave me a copy of the Calendar.” I kept rocking and I kept cutting. “You know you get silent at all the wrong times,” said Alabama. “They’re not going to kill him, right,” I said. “They probably would have just done it right there, if they were,” she said. “What do you think Irmgard is doing right now,” I said. “Getting rained on,” she said.

  She had books. She kept them in her closet, out of sight of her parents. Books on theurgical history, including an English translation of Erchaana of Dachaaua. She knew much of what I asked without having to look it up. The Treaty of Constantinople, concluded in 901 by Sviatoslav the Mad, a Croatian warlock, and Pope Benedict IV. Or the Massacre of Amiens: shortly before the city of Amiens joined the crown possessions of France, an emissary came to its lords from Louis VII. He demanded that, as a precondition for assimilation, the city fathers gather together the local witches and warlocks, of which there had long been a thriving community, since the days of Chlodio. This emissary was called Perrin de Cissey; he ranked among the greatest theurgists of his day, a master in the art of scapulimancy, the art of divin­ation by the use of shoulder bones. De Cissey offered the assembled warlocks and witches a choice: convert or face execution. All of them, all of the Great Hundred, as they are called, refused. Except one, a woman. De Cissey spoke a phrase; the gathered men and woman cried out in agony, as pain raced through their veins and arteries, as their feet grew into the ground and their arms stretched skyward, as their senses deserted them and their skins hardened into bark: a stand of elm. He meant it as a mark of respect. He offered the traitress a place but with a condition. She accepted. He chained her to an oaken board and cut out her vocal cords with an iron dagger. Had iron bracelets hammered closed around her wrists. She survived, said Alabama. She survived even de Cissey, who died at the hands of Philip Augustus.

  A lineman in a rocking chair and a lithe girl, armed. Alone in a room in the cold rain. You could not ask for anything more aesthetic. To this day the memory fills me with vague shame. Youth, youth, and more youth. “Good night,” I said, “I enjoyed meeting your parents.” “I don’t know why,” she said, closing her eyes. The lids rosy. She stuck out her hand for a shake. She was lying with the book tented over her abdomen. I walked down the stairs and out into the weather. Her parents told me I was always welcome in their home. I had to bite back a laugh. They stood framed in their open doorway. Stone wolfhounds, navel-high, one on either side of the door. “We love meeting Ally’s friends,” said her father, “it’s très cool.”

  19

  The world, says Erzmund, will invite you to struggle. Gainsay it. The expert has nothing to do with moral struggles or any other of the trumpery decorating this unpredictable life. No use telling an eighteen-year-old not to struggle. Yet I tried to heed his advice. It was difficult. Nobody noticed at school that Hob was gone. They just stopped calling his name in class. Sister Immaculata never mentioned him, once, during chapel or world history. Coach Madigan said nothing. Gilder made no jokes about his gayness. Potash had done his work well. Whatever charm he’d spoken, whatever incantation—pure art, seamless and whole. It worried me. Against that, what hope do you have? Then again, if it hadn’t been for Messaline, I was fairly sure I could have at least punched him in the face. He didn’t look tough. A lifetime of getting by, of working your will without pain or cost, without even having to think, you wave your wand and speak a formula and there it is: this would damage you. Such a life could make you weak. Such a life could make you lazy. Such a life could make you stupid. One of the hallmarks of stupidity is the overrating of your own talent. This is universal to the truly stupid.

  School buildings on Saturdays: ghost city. Especially a Catholic school. Your steps echo. Your voice falls flat. The high ceilings menace you. The pious, piercing eyes of Saint Cyprian stare up at you from the floor mosaic. Cyprian was martyred in 258 AD in the city of Carthage. Beheading. He knelt and blindfolded himself beforehand and thanked his god. I hate pictures of saints. Even now. But Coach Madigan liked to remind us that we had duties to higher powers than ourselves. Thus the football team had to come in two weekends a month. Coach Madigan would set up early practices and make us do endurance training: sprints, tire courses, weight vests. That morning he made us run suicides in the gym. Errol Coward puked on the red synthetic-clay track that encircled the field. I did not puke. “Gentlemen, this is a disgrace,” he said, “a disgrace.” I’d asked him about Hob, right at the start. Just to see what would happen. To see how complete Potash’s victory was. Coach Madigan looked through me. My words did not register. “You gonna die today,” Greg Gilder said to me as we lined up for the tire course. Pointing. Dead grin. Those teeth. “That’s the spirit, Gilder,” said Coach Madigan. “Yeah, that’s the spirit,” I said. Low and hollow. “Do you have precious thoughts to share with the team, Wood,” said Coach Madigan. I wanted to assert that Hob existed. Despite all their empty heads. I didn’t say anything.

  Coach Madigan dismissed us at noon. I showered and dressed, my clothes sticking to my damp skin. I went for a wander around the halls. That’s what I did after weekend practices. To see what was going on. I once caught Sister Immaculata eating cherries, framed in the doorway of the teacher’s lounge, eating them out of a blue paper cone and spitting the pits with demonic accuracy into a metal trash can. It rang. Every hit. Cyprian’s seemed empty. I was ready to leave. When I saw Hob’s locker. Then I knew. The padlock shining. It made me feel like a moron. I thought: What if it’s in there? This also seemed moronic. Too obvious. Too easy to access. For Potash, I mean. But I couldn’t shake the thought. Maybe it was. I remembered that story by Poe they made us read. I walked over. On tiptoe. Number 318. I fingered the pa
dlock. Heavy and cold. The building creaked. A rat ran out of an open classroom door. “Don’t remind me,” I said. It paused at my feet. Stared up. I shook my head. It scurried on. Claws clicking. I wondered if all the rats in the city worked for Mr. Stone.

  Hob’s combination. I knew I couldn’t guess it. So I just held the lock in my fist, letting it get warm. I checked the length of the hall. I even ran up to either end and stared down the connecting corridors. No one around. The rat had gone. I shrugged off my equipment bag and kneeled. I took the lock in my two hands. I pictured the wheels inside of it—not that I had the faintest idea of how a lock was set up internally—spinning and aligning. I tried to let go. I tried not to struggle. Nothing. I took a deep breath. I tried again. Clenching my jaw. The dial budged. A tick or two. Again, nothing. “Please, god, please, god,” I said. My curt prayer echoed. Useless. I knew. I said it anyway. I concentrated again. A drop of blood slid from my nose. The dial twitched against my palm. Nothing. “Fuck it,” I said. I turned to leave. I saw Hob fall again. I saw Potash’s opulent head. Then I was breathing through my clenched teeth. Furious. I drew back my fist, to punch the metal door. Yellow. About the color of the sigil of the open eye. Why we had yellow lockers I never knew. And then I realized. Things had slowed down. My heartbeat. My breathing. My blood flow. All the trembling and effort, gone. I just felt calm. Like I was standing within a quiet, clean-aired auditorium, as a spectator to my own actions.

  My fist was moving toward the door, a fluid centimeter at a time. A water pipe rumbled. I heard each bubble breaking. My fist continued. I watched it, fascinated. It was going to hit, I saw, the door of Hob’s locker high up, near the louvers. You’re going to fuck your hand up, I thought. No fear or worry. Pure observation. The lock, I thought, would make a more logical target. So I changed my fist’s course. All it took was a simple, subtle bending of my right knee. I watched, from my invisible theater, as my fist traveled at a dignified pace through the light-filled air, in which dust motes slowly swam. My fist gathered speed. All I had to do was think and it happened. My fist was now moving faster than the motes. When my skin struck the lock, my arm thrummed, and then my whole body. The metal of the U-shaped shackle fractured. A clean, elongated chime. The metal gave up heat. Singed my knuckle. The lock fell. Clanged. Spun on the floor, throwing glints.

  Time resumed its normal stupid hurry. My pulse and blood sped up. A red spot blooming between my first and second knuckles, blooming and fading. That’s the only harm I suffered. I pocketed the broken padlock. When you see the first evidence that you’re not a total failure, you want to hang on to it. His locker door mewed as I opened it. A slight gust of slightly stale air. Lucky he had not left a sandwich in there. I assumed Potash’s incantation would have concealed that from the numb minds of my schoolmates and teachers as well. I smelled only metal and soap. Deodorant. His school books stacked and squared against one wall. His crimson scarf and coat hanging from the hook on the inner side of the door. I thought of his parents and his brother. My stomach twisted. I almost vomited. More blood dripped from my nose. I didn’t want to rifle through his possessions. It seemed obscene, now that I had the locker open. His coat first: checked the pockets, inside and out. No luck. I felt his scarf, and my heart leaped when my fingers detected a pin. It was attached to nothing. I heard Frank Santone blare, “Let’s move it, fatass.” Probably aimed at Errol Coward, called by most of us Bitchtits. Not his fault. Santone’s voice watery and diminished. The golden vibration that had filled me when I broke the lock blackened. I don’t know how else to express it. Became throbbing, body-wide pain.

  Nothing in Hob’s calculus textbook. Except symbols and problems I could not understand. I had not placed into calculus. I took a math class called Advanced Topics. A euphemism. You can’t call anything remedial in a school that costs almost thirty grand per year to attend. Nothing in his biology textbook. The same grasshopper stared out from the cover. Nothing in his physics textbook, except for a few shreds of herb and moss from a cigarette. I picked up our English anthology and began to leaf through its tissue-thin pages. I tore on, across a section from Beowulf. The edges of the book were clean and white, no dog-ears, no gray grime. This did not surprise me. When I came to the section on the Romantics, to John Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” I saw he’d excised a shallow oblong trough in the pages. A hiding place. Like in a crime novel. Lying in it was the cigar­ette case he’d taken back from Quinn. A gift from an ex. The stupid, insignificant reason he was suffering now. I opened it. I don’t know what I thought I’d find. It was empty. So I pocketed it, along with Hob’s spare deck of cards and his wristwatch. Why he had decided to remove it that day, who knows. One of those gestures that gets lost in the tangle of history. His textbooks and coat and scarf I crammed into my equipment bag. I wanted to look them over again to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. The voice of a crowd rose and fell, and I heard the hollow boom Cyprian’s front door made whenever it shut after being opened. Barring any rats or random school staff, I was now alone. The broken lock and the cards and Hob’s watch in my left pocket, the empty case in my right. Such are the tools with which you confront your life. Always insufficient.

  20

  The Black Dog. That was the name of the bar Vincent worked at. On Amsterdam, near a synagogue with the facade of a shut, fortified armory. I remembered the name because Simon Canary once asked Hob about getting his brother to let him in there. Hob told him that the bar was a shithole, and there were plenty of shitholes in New York happily serving the underage that wouldn’t require his owing his brother a favor. Such actions impeded his popularity. That’s how life is. Follow your principles and you will suffer. As it turned out Simon wouldn’t have needed any help getting into the Black Dog. I walked through the doors in the middle of a Saturday, carrying a school-emblemed gym bag, and nobody asked me for identification. There was in fact nobody there except Vincent. Standing behind the bar in a black suit and golden tie. Drinking from a white mug with the words WORLD’S GREATEST printed on one side and a large, canine-shaped chunk missing from the lip. Flies: also present. They came in for the warmth. “Prove it,” sang whoever was singing on the jukebox. A guitar arpeggio followed. “Oh come on,” Vincent said when he saw me. I held up my hand. “I have an idea,” I said. “Wood, seriously, your ideas are terrible, all right,” he said. I let him finish. I explained. He didn’t scoff. He didn’t say anything at first. “We should at least check, right,” I said, “even if I didn’t find anything the first time.” He took another slurp. “What do you expect me to find that you didn’t,” said Vincent. “He’s your brother,” I said. “Don’t fucking remind me,” he said. The jukebox emitted its underearthly blue-green glow. Vincent clicked his tongue. I said nothing. The singer continued to sing. Half yowl, half pure. The light the exact shade, I realized, of the sea serpents in the whiskey carboys. “We need to be quick about this,” he said. Started moving. Shut off the lights.

  His apartment: bare. A bed. A lamp. A tall mirror canted against one wall. Four bookcases. Crammed. The shelves bowed under the weight. Four windows looked down onto the street. You could see the sign for the Black Dog. “You have an easy commute,” I said. “Do you not understand what quick means,” said Vincent. He was already pacing. Foot routes worn into the uncarpeted floor. I dumped the contents of Hob’s locker. The bio textbook landed faceup, the grasshopper staring. I wish the world could survive without insects. They make human rapacity seem gentle and moderate. “All right,” said Vincent. He lifted his brother’s empty coat. His knife flashed. That same short curved knife he’d used to collect the cigarette moss from the water-lapped basement wall. He drew it with frightening speed. He cut out the coat’s lining from the torso, using the knife’s point. Wrist tense. Shook the coat. Nothing. He removed the sleeves and opened them. The scarf he examined and tossed away. The textbooks he cut up with the same cool-handed, orderly haste: spread them, cut the glue or thread that held the pages in, run t
he blade under the endpapers, shake out the bundles of pages. “These are called,” he said, lifting a bundle, “signatures, by the way, you ignorant ape.” I’d never heard the word used in that sense before. “I remember this book with the katydid,” he said as he sliced the bio book’s binding, “or maybe she didn’t. Fucking Katy.” The grasshopper stared, hunger­ing, blank.

  His cutting drew and held my gaze. He did it in a professional-­seeming trance, eyes nearly closed. When he had reduced the books, the coat, and the scarf to neat rags, he said: “Well, that was a total failure. Is there anything else?” I almost didn’t give him the case. I almost failed to mention it. Because it had come from Hob’s nameless ex-boyfriend. Because it was empty. Which I told Vincent. “Nothing in it,” I said. He popped the latch and eyed the metal interior. “Nothing, huh,” he said. “I mean just look,” I said. “You do not know my brother very well, Wood,” said Vincent. He stared at the metal interior again and jabbed his thumbnail at the top inside cover. The plating behind the obsidian plaque. “There we go,” he said. A panel had popped open. Inside, I saw a yellow-white square of paper. “What,” said Vincent. He had the paper or parchment or vellum open, close to his eyes, nose against its surface. His breathing intensified. He inhaled its—I presume—scent. “What,” he said. Low and whispery now. In reverence. “Michael Wood,” he said. “What,” I said. “No, shut up and look,” he said.