I walked to my altar and eased down to the floor in front of it. I couldn’t kneel, not with my knee the way it was, so I sort of leaned over until I could drop to my ass on the ground, legs in front. “Please, then.”
“Well, never let it be said that I did not care for my Ruachim. I will do my best to explain your circumstances, on one condition.”
“I didn’t know one’s own immortal soul set conditions for information.” I reached across to beckon for the cat. “Before I make any more contracts with you, spirit, you need to prove you are what you say you are. ‘Kutkha’ is not even a real name. Kutkh was a Siberian culture hero and, I might add, a trickster.”
“That he was: I am an admirer of his. You could just as readily call me Prometheus or Lucifer—it matters not. None of them are my true name, but you don’t have a larynx capable of pronouncing the words which comprise it, Hu-Man.”
A ruffling passed through the room, a small breeze. Binah hopped down to the floor and came to sit beside me. She was watching something, her eyes tracking motion I could not see.
“What you do not see, Alexi, is that you must prove yourself to me. You feel the truth of my being here. You accepted the bargain. I am not yours: you are mine.”
“So, what is your condition, then?” I spoke cautiously. It was true that I had felt his arrival like a shattering, an epiphany, but spirits were often deceptive. I have never trusted feelings without evidence. I looked over at the collection of books around the altar table. Not a single one held the knowledge that could help me.
“You must eat eggs,” Kutkha said, after a suitably dramatic pause. “As many eggs as it takes to feel full. Then, you must shower and put yourself to bed.”
That was it? Before I could ask, the sudden desire for food overwhelmed all other thought. Fried eggs and sour cream. Ten minutes ago, I would have thrown up if I’d smelled food, but I found myself staggering up on my feet and limping to the kitchen before I really knew what I was doing, possessed of an impossibly strong desire to eat. Eggs, onions, sour cream. Greens, oh yes. Kale or spinach. How long had it been since I ate?
Aware that I’d been struck around the head, I started with two eggs. Five eggs later, I finally turned the stove off and leaned back from my plate at the kitchen table with a bulging stomach and surprisingly little nausea. I didn’t feel Kutkha’s presence again until we were back in the darkness of the bedroom and sprawled on top of the covers, stomach bulging. The rhythmic sound of the air conditioner washed over me in cool thrumming waves. I did feel better.
“So.” Kutkha seemed to speak from the ceiling over my head. “I suppose the first thing you want to know is how I come to be with you.”
“I want to know how to cast magic properly,” I replied tersely. “And why God, or this G.O.D figures into this.”
“Patience,” Kutkha replied. “To put it rationally, GOD is a living organism which spans all known realities, of which every living thing is a single particle in its many billions of strands of genetic material. It does not have a HuMan face. It heeds no religion and knows nothing except itself.”
Having it laid out so blandly, so efficiently, was oddly challenging. “I think we’re talking about different gods.”
“There are no gods as you understand,” Kutkha said. “No heaven or hell. No angels, though there are demons.”
Just as well I was an atheist. I’d never found meaning in Judaism, the religion of my mother, or entertained joining the rest of the Brighton Beach locals at their stuffy Ukrainian Eastern Orthodox church. I had a powerful sense of there being more “something” within myself, and possessed theoretical knowledge of a lot of different faiths, and that was the sum total of my spirituality.
“And is this… information that Carmine knows?” I was dubious. He hadn’t really seemed like the philosophical type.
“That depends on his Neshamah and whether or not he listens to it,” Kutkha said. “Its age and experience. Its… motives… for empowering him. He seems like a powerful Phitometrist to you, but I suspect he has little Pressure behind his Art.”
“Pressure.” And Flow, which my Neshamah had remarked on before. I frowned, thinking. “If Flow is the ability to… release or control Phi, which I assume is magical energy, then I can make an educated guess and say that Pressure has to do with how much is in reserve.”
“Yes. That is why it is important to understand the structure of a HuMan being, from GOD to Nephesh. Phi is the sap that flows through your being. It can be expressed as magic. Some branches are blocked up: the flow is stilted, and it and the fruit withers.”
I could guess at his implication. Binah hopped up beside me on the bed, folded herself into my armpit, and began to knead my shoulder. I closed my eyes, drinking in the sky-blue image-texture of her purr. “So I need a better magical framework than what I have, then?”
“You already have a framework,” Kutkha replied. Its voice was more strident now, though still sibilant and ethereal. “You merely need to free up the energy to fuel your will. To cease being static, you must submit to Awe.”
I felt the corners of my eyes crinkle as I squinted up into the dark. “I don’t know what you mean. There’s factors and complexity totally unaccounted for. Carmine has magical tools, and those… summoned dogs of his. Can you do that?”
“No. Do not envy him, my Ruach.” Kutkha was suddenly very serious and… uncomfortable. “The hounds are his own Neshamah… he is like a deformed baby born with their organs exposed to the air. He fancies himself and his Neshamah to be powerful, but only because his exposed virgin flesh has not yet been touched by infection. His time might come… whether in this lifetime or the next.”
“You need to tell me more about this,” I said. “Don’t hide from me, Kutkha.”
“I plan to.” In my mind’s eye, he tucked his head under his wing. “But it is time for you to sleep.”
“God, not you too. Kutkha—”
“‘Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?’” Kutkha recited the half-remembered verse in a softer voice. “‘Can you remain unmoving until the right action presents itself?’”
“The Tao Te Ching.” A pang shot through my chest. It reminded me of Vassily, alone in his room down the hall. “Verse Fifteen.”
“Yes.” Kutkha formed the word strangely, like an incantation.
“In other words, you’re telling me to shut up.”
There was no reply, save for a vague sense of amusement which might have been my own.
I had a feeling that my sleep was destined to be restless. The black sucked me under like thick mud, but I was lucid. I knew I was asleep when I could no longer hear the air conditioner or Binah’s rumbling purr. The brief period of unconsciousness ended when I was ejected from nothing onto a dusty sandstone floor.
The dust in my nose felt very real as I snorted it out. The hallway was cool, and as I lifted my face, a perfumed wind danced across my skin and ruffled the downy hairs of my face.
Ahead of me was a doorway, hung with gauzy drapes that ballooned shallowly on the air. Beyond them was a darkness so deep it throbbed. A flight of stairs was behind me, and I knew without a doubt that they led up to the usual site of my lucid dreams, that childhood house with the haunted, empty rooms. I turned back to face the passage ahead. I could see nothing past the threshold, and for some reason, my throat clotted with fear.