“What have you got over there, Yuri Denisovitch, an African rhinoceros?”
Then, more quietly, he hears her exclaim, “Shit! Spiders! So many!”
Now the sound of a broom (cheap, modern) whacking at the floor, a hurried prayer.
The cat yowls miserably from his bedroom.
The breeze stops.
The room warms, if it can be called that, from cold to merely cool.
Half an hour passes before he dares remove his terry cloth blindfold.
It is soaked with sweat.
But he did not piss himself this time.
24
An older man on a wide-screened television is speaking in a broad New England dialect that recalls the unhurried pace of a dray horse. The man’s head is long and horselike, handsome even though he is in his late sixties. He looks down at a paper, then up at the viewer.
Up at Andrew.
But he doesn’t see the younger man.
Not yet.
It’s still just a tape.
“…His life actually depends on obedience to spiritual principles. If he deviates too far, the penalty is sure and swift…”
The man drops his eyes to the paper.
“Bill.”
“He sickens and finally dies.”
Andrew knows the man will look up at the camera before speaking again.
“Bill Wilson. It’s Andrew Blankenship.”
“Andrew Blank…?”
Recognition steals across the older man’s face.
The trapdoor is open.
The dead man in the grainy color home movie becomes a little blurrier. But now he is awake, aware. He pokes his horn-rimmed glasses up on his nose and squints at Andrew through the television. He is off-script now. His surroundings are frozen. The tape stops turning in its machine.
The lights in the media room are warm and reassuring, not bright, but neither dim. Andrew doesn’t know what he looks like through the television, from there. Neither does he know if he is communing with a soul or if he is somehow snatching conversation with the man in his own time.
What he does know is that the dead souls, or the encapsulated intelligences, or the shades in Hades, or whatever they are, remember him when he finds them again.
There is continuity.
“Where are you?” Bill says, squinting.
“I’m at home.”
“That’s right. You do this from your basement, right?”
“Yes.”
Bill chuckles agreeably. He is an old man in this 1964 clip Andrew got on eBay and converted to VHS from eight-millimeter. He is speaking at a meeting in a private home in Philadelphia. He largely reads from the work of the “first hundred drunks” in this piece, and Andrew has found that this point, where he talks about death, is the easiest point at which to interrupt him. The visible half of a stainless steel water pitcher gleams below Bill, but it gleams like a still photograph.
He knows the man could touch the pitcher and the condensation would bead again; a droplet would run down the side. He could wake the pitcher up. But he would see the pitcher only if Andrew told him it was there. If he asked the dead man what was around him, he would say it was blurry, or foggy, and then, very probably, cognitive dissonance would rear its head and the dead man would start to get upset. When speaking with the dead through film, it is best to keep their attention on you.
They’ve already been through this.
Bill knows he’s dead in 2012.
Andrew told him.
Bill knows, too, that Andrew is a sorcerer, but he doesn’t hold that against him. Nor does he seem to mind Andrew’s long hair and odd clothes. Bill is perhaps the least judgmental dead person with whom Andrew has spoken.
“The last time we spoke,” Bill says, “you told me you were sponsoring a young lady from Wisconsin.”
“Her father’s from Wisconsin.”
“That’s right. How’s she doing?”
“She’s got six months now. And her slips aren’t so bad, so she’s been effectively sober for eight years. Although I don’t think she’s really hit bottom.”
“How long ago did we speak?”
“It’s been… months.”
Bill wipes his eyes under his glasses like he’s tired.
“Seems like five minutes ago. Time doesn’t make any sense here.”
He begins to look around.
Begins to look agitated.
“Bill.”
Bill looks at Andrew again.
“Yeah, sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. I was just wondering if you’re still comfortable being my sponsor. This is a…”
Andrew trails off.
“Highly unusual situation, I know,” Bill finishes for him, “but, sure. I’ll keep meeting with you. What else have I got to do with myself, after all? And I say that without asperity.”
“Great.”
“So what’s on your mind?”
“I… wonder if giving up magic and giving up drinking are similar things.”
“Sure they are. Thinking about going back to church?”
Bill is in earnest when he says this. Andrew suppresses a laugh but acknowledges that it would have been a sorry, yellow little laugh anyway.
“No.”
“That’s up to you, of course.”
And where did church get you, old man? Is that heaven? Is that even you?
“Yeah. I just wonder if I could give it up now. If I wanted to.”
“Not alone, certainly.”
What exactly is my higher power, anyway?
“I’m sorry. It just. It feels good to talk to you.”
“Lost your dad young, did you?”
“I did.”
“It’s a hard thing not to have your dad. You look for what you’re not getting from him in other people. And that’s okay. Love is always A-OK.”
Andrew nods.
Tears are close.
He fights them back.
And here sits the magus in a dim room, using dirty tricks to disturb a dead man’s rest, crying because he wants his daddy and his mommy.
Boo fucking hoo.
“We have sponsors in the world of magic, too. Mentors.”
Bill just listens.
“Mine lived in Ohio.”
25
1977.
Near Xenia, Ohio.
The last warm day of the year.
“I’m not queer,” the driver says.
“That’s not my business,” Andrew Randolph Blankenship says, although he has just begun to wonder why a bald, bearded man with his shirt unbuttoned to show his potbelly might slow his big, blue Impala to a crawl next to a teenaged boy walking his bicycle.
“You always walk your bike past this house.”
The man points at a lopsided 1890s two-story with peeling blue paint and a sun-faded FOR SALE sign.
Andrew doesn’t say anything. He just furrows his brow as he often does when he is processing a lot of information.
Watching me? Is this guy dangerous? Does he know why I walk my bike here? Does he see her too?
“You know there’s a ghost in that house, don’t you?”
Andrew feels his heart thudding in his chest.
There is a ghost and it scares the shit out of me.
I walk my bike because I’ve wrecked twice knowing it was looking at me.
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t sir me.”
“Okay.”
Andrew scratches at one of the sideburns he has begun to grow in emulation of his older brother. Although Charles will soon shave his because they look too “hippy-dippy.”
But this dude.
Who is this dude?