AND I’D GET HOME and we’d settle down, to supper and the TV, and Lam would do juggling tricks with eight oranges, one for each of the stellar Gateways, and I’d see them flash in and out of existence, into space and back again, as far as Betelgeuse and back. Or that’s what Ray told me was happening. “See what giant hands he has!” says Ray. “To him an orange is an apricot, and just as well. Maybe a planet is an orange…”
And I see the giant hands. And Vanessa starts up in my head about Betelgeuse, the red giant, whence all the trans-mundane intelligences have their birth: she’s running down a page in a publication called The Oneness, and I, Joan, have to stamp her down because Vanessa will not for one moment accept that Lam is an alien just because Ray says he is.
“Actually Lam doesn’t really come from Tibet,” says Ray. “I was only having you on, Joan. Nor is he an alien. He’s from the Dogon tribe in Mali. They all look like that there, and juggle with oranges because of their hands.”
“Don’t talk such nonsense,” Alden says to Ray. “The poor girl is confused enough already.”
I am having a hard time with Vanessa today; since the second incident with a bath she’s been quite stroppy. She’s back and whizzing through the pages of a work written in 1950, by the anthropologist Marcel Griaule, with help from the Dogon tribe who knew more about Sirius and its unseen star companions than could reasonably be expected. Its title is “Un Système Soudanais de Sirius.” Power devolved from Betelgeuse to Sirius, says Vanessa, at least according to the Thelemites, and a being from the double star was sighted by Crowley in 1918—
“Oh shut up, shut up,” I cry. “Too much information!” and Alden and Ray look quite put out, thinking I am talking to them which of course I am not. Ray puts me under will to calm me, and we all go to bed together which is probably the best thing that can happen. Vanessa hasn’t been shopping for a week or so and the Bipolar Two part is getting quite difficult. Alden still can’t come and Ray still can’t stop himself, but it’s cozy and friendly and I don’t mind at all. Or Ray says I don’t. And at least Vanessa’s gone again, the snarky bitch, I’m glad.
We’re up in the attic on the sofa. Alden’s hum is on the loudspeaker. The tone has changed. The pitch is lower. I have a distinct impression it’s something to do with Bride in the Bath. This is because of something Alden says. “Listen to that,” he says proudly, “it’s good. That’s what the gurgle input does. That was some gurgle, that was.”
That was the death cry of the virgin he was talking about, at the hands of Sir Jasper and the false priest. The rattle of the death of hope as the bridal veil is thrust down the maiden throat. But Alden didn’t even stop in his flow: he is talkative and animated tonight. When Lukas finally delivered the newly-equipped bed rejigged with Bluebeard Alden would be able to map pitch, duration, intensity, velocity and envelope; determine loop length, sample rate, and so on, of similar sounds, and subject the lot to granular synthesis: the new special synthesizers from China would allow him to involve light and intensity movement. Or something. I’d switched off by then, and so had Ray, who yawned, though I daresay Vanessa was listening. But I’m feeling sleepy. I often am, these days.
We’re up in the studio again. Lam is juggling oranges again.
Fruit-bearing trees originate on Sirius, Ray tells me, according to a lecture on the Transcendentalists he’d just been to at the Southgate Centre.
“He must be missing home,” says Ray.
“But you said he was a Dogon,” I say.
“Same thing,” says Ray.
“Do stop all that crap,” says Alden. He makes a speech. “You’re a natural hypnotist, that’s all it is. Fourth Path, my ass. Joan’s a happy little sex slave, a sub to my dom, a bottom to my top, not a route to higher powers, not an approach to the transcendental, just a help in getting some rather important atonal music written. Stick with the lectures on Japanese rope bondage, leave the rest to me. You get more of a hard-on down the Divan than up at Southgate with the dreamers, not that that’s saying much. Nor is Lam an alien, he’s the guy who pushes my chair about and helps me organize my sex life. You haven’t touched that fucking painting for days.”
But the oranges glitter their reflection into all the little mirrors on the canvas, ninety-three of them, and suddenly the whole room seems ablaze, throwing back flashes of color as the oranges whirl, reds and oranges, mixed with the blue of the base to add purples, from each to each, back and back into infinity. And even Alden seems quite awed and is silent.
And in the silence of my own head Vanessa is starting up again about the number 93. Why was Crowley so fascinated by it? Was it just because he happened to rent rooms on the fourth floor at No. 93 Jermyn Street, above Paxton’s, the famous cheese shop? Vanessa’s over-heated mind whizzes through the references. Aleister Crowley moved in to No. 93 with his new wife Rose on March 25th 1907, the Great Beast 666, founder of Crowleyanity and preacher of the Law of Thelema. He was 29. His life had already been marked by excess and odd events. He had written peculiar but much-admired poetry, he had alarmed society with his odd views on sex and religion, he had gathered a crew of literary occultists round him—W.B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Saki, Synge, Jepson, Wilde—and artists too—Marcel Duchamp, Nina Hammett, Epstein—and quarreled bitterly and publicly with most of them. He had already founded the Argentum Astri, Inner Order of the Thelemites: the Outer Order having become too petty and ordinary for its founder. He had won renown of all things as a mountaineer: in 1903 he had even been approached by the famous Dr. Jules Jacot-Guillarmod to accompany him on the first expedition to Kanchenjunga, the third largest mountain in the world, in Nepal. He had accepted. The team used the Singalila approach. Crowley led the trek. Four of its members failed to survive, swept away by an avalanche at 25,000 feet. (According to Crowley; others said 21,000.) Rumors abounded. The porters had wanted to turn back: their mountain gods were thunderous and angry. But Crowley, having his own hotline to his own powerful entities, insisted the party went on. The mountain gods won. Crowley fled and left his men to die. And all he had to say about it was “their disobedience resulted in things going wrong.”
Vanessa’s knowledge beats in my head like some frenetic bird desperate to get out. I wish she’d shut up. I want to concentrate on the dancing of orange light. Ray’s tiny strokes of black have begun to cavort and tangle through the air. The hum is getting louder: Alden has turned the volume up. These are my own shrieks and screams and cries de joie, my own terror and exultation, my degradation and my exhilaration, channeled and booming through the bowels of the earth, now vibrating the bluey-orange-purple air. I cover my ears but the whole room trembles. The light thrown back from the painting is now moving toward the blue glow of a billion computer screens, in the infinite complexity of their making, the darting of the synapses of the brain echoed in the darting of the pixels, a billion tiny sticks of black, the peoples of the earth, writhing and copulating, the Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors. They bring the Bride new gifts in the name of Bill Gates, Lord of the XXX sites, newly crowned king of the universe, God of Gods, whose servant and priestess I have become. I am the Scarlet Whore of New Babylon, the face of computer sex and my nation is Babel, and I am as mad as Vanessa. I cannot keep her split off from me for much longer.
She is pinching me, she is urging me. “Joan, Joan,” she is saying, “Aleister’s wife Rose died in a mad house.”
“Well, that’ll be your doing, not mine. You’re the mad one, everyone knows, I’m perfectly sane. I’m the laughing, happy little one,” I snarl back at her. But she won’t be quiet.
“Listen to me, listen to me, Joan. It says here the Scarlet Woman, Crowley’s whore, was slain by constant copulation with a he-goat!” and at that I, Joan laugh. The nearest thing round here to a he-goat would be Ray, and Ray is not exactly going to make me die from sexual exhaustion. And Alden can’t be a goat: he hardly has the legs for it. If only he were. But his plunging and plunging, and his lack of coming is, I decide, oddly unsatisfactory for me and a source of resentment. Which is I guess why Vanessa keeps making her manic entrances: that, and the lack of shopping. I haven’t been shopping for ages. There hasn’t been time, I’ve been too busy whoring.
The lights stop circling, the room stops vibrating. Lam has put away his oranges. Silence. Then Alden’s cellphone beeps, which breaks the trance and he answers it and it’s someone from the Lukas workshop saying the bed will be delivered on Friday week. Such is Alden’s pleasure at this news that he is delivered to my bed again and continues plunging but to tell you the truth I’m so bored I fall asleep mid-thrust and have to be woken by Lam’s long poking finger prodding my shoulder.