Book of Leaves
A small town hugs a stretch of rural highway somewhere. Started really only so drivers didn’t run out of gas between LA and Bakersfield. Given a euphemistic name like King City, so the sad reality could be ignored by those just passing through: people lived here. Some never left.
Hidden away from the highway and the gas stations and fast food was a worse euphemism: “The Elysium Center for Mental Wellness.” Identified by only a small sign on the front door, lest the sturm und drang penitentiary for the non-sane offend the sensibilities of the rest of us. Or worse, infect them.
Lily was in the right place.
She signed some papers and a waiver at the front desk. Dark looks from the staff made it clear visitors weren’t usual or welcomed, lest they become permanents. A towering R.N. stared a final warning ahead of the grand tour--many with sterner stuff than this ingenue had left permanently unwell. But Lily had come all this way, and like all misguided youth, thought she could always go home again.
Nurse Ronove led her down hallways of linoleum and sick fluorescents, through the chemical warfare haze of formalin disinfectant and the thick debased taste of human waste. Merely severely disabled “patients” encircled a muted TV, laughing maniacally at nothing, faces contorting into epileptic spasms of momentary exorcism, stuck in a circle of repetition.
A medieval steel gate was the threshold before the bowels of the asylum proper. A last defense against some apocalyptic contingency best not considered. Lily watched the nurse unlock it with a rusted key and retract it. A lightswitch should have been next, but illumination was anathema here. An artificial version of full moon pandemonium. Some things best stay in the dark.
Each double locked door held some vision of human torment behind it. Worse to imagine it, until the maniacal and ludicrous realized they had company, their caterwauling chorus of insanity contagious and spreading. Reality was worse than imagining. Crawling under doors, squeezing through cracks in the walls: tortured atavistic grunts and howls stillborn from human life unrecognizable, but for nothing else on earth could convey torture so extreme. Aborted wails clawing at the boundary between us and them begging the sane to come over and join. Some piece always did.
For the lucky it was only temporary.
“Don’t make eye contact...It excites them.”
The nurse stopped at door 616 and began to unlock it, oblivious to the rabid beat of limbs and heads smashed against safety glass from adjoining cells in tribal rhythm. Hungry for fresh blood, intact brains; desperate to escape and convert the visitors to their primeval religion.
“Here’s your friend.”
“What’s left of her.”
It was Kali. Same ice blond hair. Skin white enough to glow. But this was the horrible facsimile. A toddler’s doll, after she’d given it a haircut with plastic scissors and left it out in the rain for a few seasons. A prop corpse in an old haunted house. Except for the Level 4 restraints pinning her to the bed.
“Is she always tied down?”
“Only when she has a visitor.”
“Does anyone ever visit?”
The nurse chuckled at that one.
Lily whispered her friend’s name softly...Kali. Through the narcotics, tranqs, blitzed neuronal connections, rotting white matter, something stirred. Her head began to jerk. Twitching in sinus rhythm. Still for an instant, then more violent. Shaking off some cursed thought had found purchase, and the horror acknowledged that it was permanent. Kali’s eyelids shot open. Lily’s knees buckled and the nurse caught her.
“Self-denucleation.”
A strange word that defined itself deep in the lizard part of Lizzy’s brain. She saw the white of the skull deep in the empty eye sockets and had a fleeting panic that she needed restraints herself. Before she clawed that image out of and into her own head...Leave.
“I think I….”
“You had enough?”
The pumping blood, the bile about to come up. The madness becoming contagious, it had electrified Kali with purpose, an invitation to the party. Body bucking and writhing against the restraints, finding impossible strength. Her thumb snapped backwards and her wrist shattered into an acute angle, flopping like a piece of overfolded origami, Kali ripping from the wrist cuffs. Loud as a gunshot in the sepulchre. Dangling fingers and meat groped Lily by the hair, pulling her closer.
“Leave! Leave! Leave! Leave!”
The nurse smashed the alarm and hit Kali with an emergency mainline of Haldol.
The visit was over. First and last. Enough to be forever.
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Lilly’s first memory was carrying her little Barbie suitcase through the palatial American Revival double doors of the Webster mansion on the shores of Malibu. She was Malibu Barbie now, her mom had joked. She was six.
Her psychiatrist’s office was an airy loft attached the Eternal Beauty Plastic Surgery Clinic; posters of svetle de-aged celebrities greeted her every visit, the siren song of trophy wives through the revolving door. Nightmares of lost youth had also brought Lily here, but her Doctor worked on the interior. All the degrees on the wall said so. It didn’t take him long to find his buzzword du jour: memory repression.
Mom never told Lily much about those years. Her early life was hard, many zip codes and lifetimes away from Malibu. A place where women aged much faster, and showed it. Deer Creek. An addendum on a map in the foothills of the Sierra. A mining camp more than anything proper. A fire at the shale pool had killed her father, leaving a single mother that never came home much. “To make ends meet,” Mom said. How mom did that was never really covered, but the cause of her repressed memories came to light when the doctor started asking questions.
“It’s not what your perverted mind is thinking.”
Kali was only a kid herself, but old enough to babysit in Deer Creek for mac and cheese and a quiet place to avoid her own relations. Lily wondered if her dark makeup and black hair made her a witch, like Halloween twenty four seven. Mom said she was just lonely and dealing with “family things.” Which seemed like a yes.
All Soul’s Day, November 1st, the girls had wandered the camps and mobile home park, asking for leftover treats. Which had gone pretty well, but Kali was still distant, looking for some dark satisfaction to her angst which Halloween had promised but never fulfilled. It was the high witch’s sabbath after all. A day of power for people like Kali and her ilk. The goths said so. But it had came and went with just more smashed pumpkins and beers and rowdy miners shouting at scantily clad teens from the backs of their pickups.
The girls found the mushrooms growing in an alder patch at the base of the rotting trestle. It was dark but the moon was out, and the mushrooms were white and ghostly like they had some internal iridescence. Kali had heard about magic mushrooms from Simon, the high school boy she spent Fridays with doing things which parents don’t approve. He dressed in black and listened to noise described by him as real music. He scared Lily, but Kali said he had a car and was going to take her to the big city.
Kali’s parents were out somewhere, so the girls took the mushrooms to her basement floor. They had lost their glow but not their awe. Kali said spells needed to be spun; life was not going to be forever turning tricks on skid row like her mom did. Lily didn’t take much convincing. Kali was a witch and the only authority figure Lily had ever trusted. They chewed down the caps and stems and chased it with Capri Suns.
“Hail Satan!”
That’s how Mom tells it. The mushrooms were magic yes. Death magic. Amanita bisporigera--The Destroying Angel. A name earned and appropriate, if you ask the bystanders.
Lily spent a year in the asylum, scratching out impressions of hell on paper they gave her to express herself, not thrusting her to talk lest she choke on her tongue again.
On day 366, Mom made the deal to get Lily released. She showed up with a Barbie suitcase.
“Time to go!”
She thought she was the lucky one. But Doctor Nielsen was suspicious by profession. He knew lying is human nature. More than a few mothers are incarnate sins of omission.
Luckily for Lily, hypnosis was his specialty. Something about traumatic recall, if was normal if things were hazy. But the truth was always a little different. Only fools implicitly trust the narrator. The lighthouse that shines in your eyes makes it impossible to see anything clearly.
That was Lily’s last session with Dr. Nielsen. His offered was shuttered the following visit, boxes being carried out by large men in functional suits. Lily never saw him again. Mom said he was just going to pump her full of drugs anyway.
“You wanna end up like your friend?”
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Japan was nuked into prostration by B-29 Bockscar in the Fall of ’45. One hundred thousand people turned to ashes in less than a second. Pretty impressive. She had to surrender. A citizenry entirely of cremains would not be appropriate subjects to worship Emperor Hirohito.
That meant San Diego suddenly found itself filled with newly landlocked sailors out of work. American Mining Co. found deep lignite deposits out near Death Valley the same year, without men to mine it. Like ships in the night, a roster of ex-Navy men eventually found themselves there. They were suited for it. Taking orders, working in filth and grime, looking at the horizon and seeing the same thing in every direction. Submariners were especially sought after. Working deep under the surface, in coffin size, coffin dark tunnels of ore was like home to them.
Even the sailors called them crazy.
Lignite was dirty, dirt cheap coal. It smelled like brimstone when it burned, and eventually killed everything it touched. Even by coal mining standards, the men died young. And because the mining slurry leached into the groundwater, sometimes the kids died younger. From diseases too long to pronounce. Two generations, one disaster, and a partial settlement later, American Mining closed shop and moved on. But many of the families didn’t, Death Valley too entrenched in their makeup.
Deer Creek would die with them. The clock was ticking.
Getting there was a brutal drive up rural 13. So far out there Lily was convinced she missed it. And the middle of nowhere didn’t like visitors. Old men watched her from their collapsing porches, propped up with 2 x 4s, shotguns within easy reach. Twenty-somethings in goth makeup were not supposed to be here. But Lily came prepared.
Her dad had a makeshift tombstone in the Potter’s field at the edge of town. Two perpendicular wood planks nailed through the center, tipped over into an X. RIP BILL WINTERS. Lily turned it 45 degrees and stuck it back into the ground. Then she got out a Solo cup and some whiskey and made a show appropriate for a memorial.
“Friend or Family?”
The old-timers didn’t say much, but they got to the point. This was a ritual they had seen many times before. They were willing to forgive Lily’s appearance. That’s what happens to kids from Deer Creek in the big city. She told them about her Dad, and just like that, they were family. Now for the reason she came here. Somethings old-timers know better than the Internet.
Lily passed around Solo Cups and whiskey. She talked about gossip, memories, the good ol’ days; standard banter of those closer to the end than the beginning. Soon they all had something to say. But when she pulled out her single Polaroid picture, Kali and Lily, miming witches for Halloween, the mood turned rancid. Looking at things on the ground was now more interesting. Fumbling hands found cigarettes and pockets and more reasons for whiskey. Lily asked about Kali’s parents and the men suddenly remembered they were standing in the middle of a cemetary. They evaporated like the smoke from their cigarettes.
But the dead man’s party had attracted an interloper:
“You know what Jesus does with painted whores like you?”
Some bitter old woman, shriveled like the town itself, bathrobe covered in cat hair. She watched Lily from behind a screen door. The only door left in an long time since mobile home. There was no car in the mud gravel patch drive, or anywhere nearby. Lily wondered how she got to church on Sunday. Maybe she did her own ceremony. Matthew did say it was the hypocrites that love to stand and pray, that they may bask in the adulation of others.
But despite the widow’s holiness, it was the bottle of whiskey that captivated the old wren’s gaze. The Lord might be her shepard, but it was the liquor for which she wanted. Lily offered it, a tithe, and the screen door opened. The Solo cup was redundant. The old arthritic knuckles were perfectly shaped to twist off a bottle cap post haste. The rest was history.
“It’s been so long since I tasted any of the good shit.”
Lily wasn’t sure Canadian Mist qualified. A time and a place for everything apparently. Diabetes made a drunk, the widow said. Lily led her to the couch, shoving cats out of their usual beds, and watched Mrs. Thoth collapse like a stained Afghan. There was awkward and bloody fumbling with an insulin injection, which Lily took as her cue to exit. But before she got to the threshold, Mrs.T licked the blood running down her forearm and asked if she could see the Polaroid.
“I recognize her. Shoulda guessed she was the reason you dress like that. Is she dead?”
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The Samael homestead was a neatly manicured oasis of Kentucky bluegrass up the Nadeu trail down into Panamint Valley. Rusted bulletholed signs and abadoned exacavators lined the way, past the scrub and gravel to a neatly squared section of silt poisoned ground patched over with expensive sod from across the country, the stage for a classic east coast Colonial. Neatly symmetric balconies and eaved windows; separate outhouses and guest quarters aligned just so. The centerpiece was a towering white cross, shadow creeping across the grounds to cover every inch when the time was appropriate. About to disappear with the sun behind the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.
Mrs. Samael was out to greet her before the car had even stopped. Lily immediately knew it was her.
“We don’t get many visitors anymore.”
She was friendly and invited Lily inside. It might have been Malibu high school or it might have been MeToo but Lily prefered the old-timers’ wary ambivalence to Stepford wife sandwiches and tea service. Lily tasted carefully for any sinister additives, decided to leave it alone anyways.
The Polaroid pulled back the veil. Clearly we’re all friends here was relative. Mrs. S scowled like someone had stained the bride’s wedding dress before the nuptials. She traced the photo with her finger, her manicured nail subconsciously scratching away at the face of her daughter. Then she slid the Polaroid back across the table and reapplied her composure as enthusiastically as an Avon Lady paying off a Buick Regal Grand National.
“Kali’s dad will be home soon. We should wait…..More tea?”
There was suddenly a newfound imperative to re-clean the immaculate kitchen, Mrs. S scrubbing obsessively at a square of tiles, lest they reveal something horribly ignominious. Lily excused herself to use the restroom. Mrs. S gave her directions without looking up, pointing emphatically with her finger.
But Lily didn’t need them. She missed the gesture. Her feet were bigger but these were steps she had taken two decades ago, tattooed somewhere deep inside the part of her brain that was supposed to be missing.
Kali’s bedroom only needed a cat and some hot cocoa to be a postcard picture out of homesteading quarterly. A Drill Sergeant could have bounced a roll of nickels off the bucolic bedspread. Covered in moons and stars. Go figure. But a bible was placed neatly squared on the nightstand; red velvet bookmark sticking out prominently from somewhere near the end. Revelations probably.
The perfect cover.
Secrets, spells and tarot cards; Nine Inch Nails and all black everything. That was what she was made of--that’s what Lily remembered. This bedroom was just another mirage for appearances. Lily shoved a row of modest calf length dresses to the side of the closet, next to the kid themed crucifix. The back panel had the grain of coffinwood, and a secret latch for nimble fingers.
A passageway to something Lily was remembering for the first time. Ropes and a table. A photo album. Of Polaroids. Filled with kids Lily’s age holding Kali’s hand. One each. And a blank page where the picture in Lily’s pocket belonged, before the pages of symbols and a hand drawn idol of Baphomet, rusted brown with dried blood.
The Book of Leaves.
All the knowledge of Hell, contained in a single prayer. Once prayed, always permanent, The madness of a existence, in this life and the next, stuck in a mind broken over the wheel of the Libro Folio. The madman’s prayer repeating over and over. To infinity. A single thought forever. Over and over.
In aeternum.
It was dark when the fire broke out. The light carried a long way and the firefighters were notified in time to save most of the property. They found Mr. S hanging by a noose from the stairwell balcony, grotesque and distended. The knot was roughshod and haphazard, miscalculated so his death was long and agonizing.
Mrs. S screams from the basement got noticed only when the commotion from the stairwell finally subsided. The firemen found her kneeling at the bottom step, using it to smash in her forehead, chanting something to herself.
“Leave! Leave! Leave! Leave!”
Lily missed the Samael finale. She was on her way back to Malibu. Drinking what was left of the whiskey. After all it was all the way from Canada.
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Mom’s career had done its own about face after Deer Creek. How she met Prince was another detail lost to history, but he was a B-Movie director with titles like “Vampire Maniac” and “Sins of the Devil.” Mom’s newly enhanced breasts soon became his favorite signature, especially when she was running from the month’s current flavor of psycho killer.Those breasts occupied the prurient thoughts of plenty young boys before the Internet put R rated nudity on the bottom shelf.
Mom and Prince retired to Malibu and had another kid, this one willing to buy into the proverbial “Lifestyle.” But the matching Range Rover for her deserving daughter wasn’t quite enough. Girls night at hip be seen sushi juke joints, despite the plunging cleavage, were getting less thumbs up on Internet. More surgical enhancement was the answer. Prince called in a few favors and Mom reinvented herself again.
Star of cable TV’s hit reality show “Malibu MILFs.”
That’s when Lily left.
Like only happens in Hollywood, a five minute call with the Malibu MILFs Producer got Lily back in good graces. They even talked money. Mother reuniting with her estranged daughter--Lily would agreed to a makeover--it was the perfect story arc for the new season. And hopefully a halt to the slide in ratings.
Lily only had one condition: the end of this familial separation had to be live: The Sunday Night “Talking Malibu” after show when the most viewers would be tuned in.
“Great idea. Consider it done. This is going to be so money.”
7 Days later Lilly was waiting in the soundstage green room. Still dressed in black. The Producer said the Goth look would make more of an impression. Troubled, depressed, even tragic. The audience would eat it up.
He asked what was in the book under her arm and Lily told him it was an old photo album. Something that was really going to move her Mom.
“That will really jerks at the feels. You’re a natural.”
Two hours later, the Production Assistant pushed Lily out the door to standard cue sign applause. But it turned to gasps and schadenfreude when they saw her appearance. Glad she wasn’t their daughter.
The reunification was stiff and awkward, like pushing two magnets with the same poles together. But good TV, until the dead air. The Producer needed to smash through this ice field. He frantically pointed at the photo album. The decision would go down in history. She was born for this moment.
Lily opened the Book of Leaves calmly, the Latin coming back to her like a memory of reincarnation:
“Non enim videbit me homo et vivet.”
It starts with a wave of head jerks across the audience.. Jerked, and frozen.
And jerked again.
The audience begins to dance. The blood and gore is their own making.
Live across America, millions of faces reflected on the TV screens jerk along with them.