I had avoided the Internet since I got out of prison in 2004, to obscure myself from Riley, but he simply snuck up on my blind spot and took over. For a week, all the social conversation turned to Riley, and his project up in Claremont Canyon right above my neighborhood. At the Peace and Freedom meetings at Niebyl-Proctor, his name was a rare curse. Usually I stood in the back, by the door, my arms crossed, silent, and let the social democrats (old, white, eager to run for office) and the Maoists (younger than me, people of color, hoping we would finally just vote to arm ourselves and storm up Telegraph Avenue) argue it out. It being anything from whom to support in Syria — surely our good thoughts would tip the scales in the left direction — to the question of whether shopping at Amazon.com was ethical. It’s not.
Riley confused everyone. His companies had never had a profitable quarter, yet he was one of the ten richest men in the world. He marketed Rcoins, his own cryptocurrency, but human beings weren’t allowed to use them; the artificial intelligences he installed in homes instead traded them among themselves on virtual marketplaces. He was a capitalist who accumulated neither capital nor profits. He had no employees, but instead simply announced some idea or tweeted out some flowcharts, and other companies turned their efforts into realizing his fancies. Whatever Riley was doing, it wasn’t anything Marx had ever predicted would come to pass, not even in his weird and speculative Grundrisse notebooks. And thus, he was the topic of the next meeting.
That night, I was finally driven to speak. Pan, normally as bored as a kid in church at these meetings, whipped his head around and gaped at me. “It’s magic,” I said. Because I’d been silent for years, because I was white, because I have resting rage face, I wasn’t interrupted or scolded. Into the void, I spoke again. “Real magic.” I was tempted to roll up my sleeves and show off the unicursal hexagrams tattooed on my forearms, but I had their attention sufficiently already. “Applied psychology, heavy on symbolism, designed to alter our brain chemistries and social relationships. There’s a specter haunting capitalism, and it’s him. The question remains the same as it’s been since 1903 — what is to be done?”
It takes a lot in Berkeley to be looked upon as some sort of kook, and with this crowd it’s even more of a challenge, but somehow I was managing it. I soldiered on: “We all talk about social systems and how they overdeteremine society, and reality. That’s why nobody here has ever driven up to Seattle and fricked Jeff Bezos.” Someone giggled. “As in Alexander Berkman assassinating Henry Clay Frick,” I explained.
A general murmur of disagreement rose. I was losing them.
I spread my arms and bellowed, “Quiet!” The effect was like a prison guard turning off a television in the common area. A roomful of sullen, burning stares.
“Riley is having something built up in the hills,” I said, calm again. “That’s the rumor anyway.”
“Where did you hear this rumor!” an older woman snapped.
“Scuttlebutt,” I said. “Maybe it’s nothing. But we know we’re all discussing him because supposedly he has his thumb in some local pies.”
“I heard it caused the earthquake the other week,” the woman said. “Whatever he’s doing up there.” Now she was the one who lost the audience. There are earthquakes all the time... We’re due for an even bigger one... came the mutters. No, she might be right, I saw on YouTube...
“I propose comrades who enjoy hiking make a concerted effort to find out what, if anything, might be under construction up there,” I said.
Heinrich, who had been facilitating the meeting, smiled widely enough that I could see his tobacco road teeth from across the room. “Of course you realize, comrade,” he said to me, gleefully, “that generally speaking, anyone who volunteers an idea also volunteers her labor to organize the intervention. Do you enjoy hiking? You’ve been attending our meetings for months, and your child has probably eaten his weight in cookies from the refreshment table during that time, but in truth we know very little about you.” He was just excited to talk down to me, to lord his tiny influence over me.
“Some of you do,” I said. A few men, only men of course, glanced at the floor or became suddenly interested in the paperbacks on the shelf closest to their seats. “But no, I’m from Lawn Guyland,” I amped up my old accent. “I’m not much for hiking. But if there is something in the hills, and if our class enemy is involved, and if we can do something, we should do something. Someone has to do something. Praxis, not just theory.”
“There you have it then,” said Heinrich. “Not much for hiking.” The conversation resumed without me, and Riley was just another abstraction for leftists to tinker with. I waved for Pan and we slid out the door. Someone snorted the word “praxis” as we left.
In the morning, when I awoke, Pan was gone. I went to the park to teach my class and told Lindsey that my son had vanished in the night. She was distraught on my behalf, and peppered me with questions. Had he been bullied at school or seemed worried? What happened last night? When had I last seen him? I made her be silent and put her through the asanas, willing her to focus and tense with a glare and serene quiet.
We attracted a crowd again. Heinrich and several of the hangers-on from the previous night’s meeting. Now they were ready to help. Not the best start, but a start. I created a void, and they filled it. Lindsey broke down and told them what had happened. They decided to ask me for a picture of Pan, and to leaflet the area. If there’s one thing leftists are still good at it, its wheatpasting flyers onto lampposts. I let them think it was their idea, and I let them stew while I performed my four asanas.
The reality is that Crowley had poisoned these asanas. Traditionally, seated yoga is meant to be performed with a certain lightness. The stretches are slow, tantalizing. The practitioner is to be comfortable, to let the muscles settle upon the bones. Crowley practiced maximum tension, absolute silence, the cultivation of pain. And he practiced in the nude, of course, as did his acolytes. Perhaps he just got off on watching men and women grimace and sweat on his command, or maybe his kink was the pain he forced himself to endure.
I was ready for the pain too. It took less than a day for the narrative to unfurl as I’d wanted it to. I was offline, but Pan had an official identity for his online school, and he had a library card. One of the books he’d checked out recently was Love Is the Law, and from there it was easy enough to determine that I was Dawn Seliger, the third most famous criminal from Long Island after Amy Fischer and Ricky Kasso. I told the police everything I knew — that after we had attended a political meeting where I recommended a search of the Berkeley Hills to settle some local rumors, we went to the RV where we sleep. I even let them inside, so they could see two beds made up. The loft bed was for me, the couch for Panagiotis.
“He must have left during the night,” I explained. They didn’t bother to run my plates, because I filled the voids of their minds with my narrative. An excitable boy, lost in the woods. That’s the important thing. Find the boy, save the boy, be good men, be heroes for a change, not just the armed servants of the bourgeois state.