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THE HISTORIES OF NOW
The crumbling factory that is my family's legacy looms before me. Its silhouette seems to lose integrity at the edges, dissolving into the heavy clouds that clog the autumn sky. We don't even have a key to it anymore. I had to make friends with Joey, the rented security guard, to find out when he makes his rounds and when he goes out to get coffee. He's at Starbucks right now and will nurse the brew back in his booth for the best part of the hour. All the security cameras on the property are fakes. I'll have plenty of time.
The whole place is surrounded by a mangy chain-link fence. I have come to believe that its purpose is less to keep people out than it is to try to keep the decay contained. It is little good at either task.
The rusted metal bites into my hands as I throw myself over it and haul the wallpaper table and the sack of chloroformed rabbits up after me.
On the other side I stand in what once passed as an exercise yard for factory workers on their lunch break. Now it's choked with weeds and litter. Nearly all the windows have been smashed and gape open, rending the heavy chain and padlock on the front door and paragons of futility. I cross the exercise yard quickly. I want to get this shit over with.
Before the beginning there was the Monad, also called the One, the Absolute, Aion Teleos, and Bythos. Within the Monad was and is a second being, an inner god split from the first. It is called Ennoia, or Charis, or Sige. Thus, the Monad is both perfect whole and divided being. It encompasses contradiction without consequence, for it is all: its imperfection is perfection, its incompleteness, completeness. Our binary thinking means little to it.
Together the Monad and Ennoia conceive a second god, the second Aion (the first being the Monad and Ennoia). The second Aion is called Caen, and we would call him male, even though that is not what he is. With him comes a third, not-quite-female Aion, named Akhana.
This was the first pair of Aions that emanated from the Monad. They in turn emanated a second male-female pair, who in turn emanated another, and they emanated again, and so on until the spiritual world was full of Aions, each pair a further step away from the Monad, each pair a little further from perfection.
I pick my way through the piles of trash and rubble. There are signs that the homeless have been here: the remains of fires made hazardously close to old cardboard boxes; discarded needles that glisten in the glare of my flashlight; the stale stink of piss.
I can't help but wonder if it really is worth saving.
My great, great grandfather had this place commissioned in 1875, when he abandoned the family's ancestral home in Cairo and moved to the New World, seeking to reestablish our slowly decaying fortune.
Back in the time of the Caesars, my family's merchant trade was represented in every civilized nation of the time. Our caravans and ships plowed every significant trade route. We even forged several of our own. We were wealthy and powerful.
But as the Roman empire declined so did my ancestor's fortunes. With each successive generation their economic dominion diminished until it was limited to Egypt, Persia, Arabia, and a few other countries, and then, over time, we held sway only within our homeland, Egypt itself. By 1850 my family owned and operated just a few small factories located near Cairo. In the early 1870s my great great grandfather sold all of these interests and left the Middle East in a bid to recreate the family's old empire anew in the Americas.
The bitch divorced me a year ago now, just after I performed this ritual last year, just after the final Bermuda trip. That was a joke. Our great idea to save things: reprise the honeymoon. That fucking honeymoon. For all we held it up and admired it, it was that damn thing that finally broke us.
Thing was, it was perfect. Two weeks in paradise, made all the sweeter for the grime that made up the rest of our lives. I was working in my dad's place, just about scraping enough time and money together to get to business school at nights. She was working the floor at Wal-Mart, trying for a manager's position. We hung the whole honeymoon on the hopes of that promotion. Blew the budget. Not a single penny left in the coffers when we got back. But we'd be okay if she got that promotion, so we went for it anyway.
Maybe it was that we were too scared to, but we didn't talk about the money once while we there. And maybe it was more than half desperation, but while we were there we enjoyed every dollar and every dime.
I tell you, it was perfect.
One of the last Aions created was called Sophia. As with many traditions it is a woman who fouls things up. There are several explanations of how she managed it, but all that really matters is what happened.
Sophia emanated an Aion on her own, rather than as part of a pair like all the other Aions had done, and as a result her creation was twisted, awkward, and wrong.
Sophia's offspring was and is the Demiurge, the creator, Samael, Yaldabaoth, Saklas. He is the one who made this world. He is responsible. The chain of divinity reaching back to the Monad, to the perfect one, had grown too thin, too weak, and it broke at him. Or maybe it was before that. Maybe the rot had set in with Sophia, but the gods had kept on going anyway.
The Demiurge is a force of evil. His creations—this world, the Archons who watch over it—are evil. The material plane, divorced from the spiritual, is his place. It is where he rules. It is a poor imitation of the spiritual world. The Monad has no sway here.
This is our home, this pitiable fake.
The ritual I perform in this place each year came with my great great grandfather from Egypt. In its days of power, my family had learned many secrets, some of which came with a burden. Some of those secrets concerned the nature of our world, of how it came to be, and what was required to keep it from an inevitable decline into madness. I hold back the Demiurge and his Archons. I keep them in check.
Each time I perform this ritual, I save the world.
The old factory is disgusting. Its stench thickens as I go deeper: sweat, and mold, and age, and fecal matter, all adding up. Graffiti covers the walls: barely comprehensible obscenities and insults, references to people's mothers and obscure sex acts. It sickens me.
The bitch never asked about the rituals. Every year I'd go and do my thing. Save the world. Keep things ticking over. Whatever. She never really asked about it. Family stuff, I'd tell her. She was good about that at least. Good Italian girl.
Of course, when we got back from Bermuda she'd been passed over for the promotion and that pretty much screwed us for a while. Pretty much screwed us period. I had to drop out of business school. She had to work longer hours. The stress started to get to us. People told us that the first year of marriage is the hardest.
That year we scraped and we saved and we fixed our eyes on just getting through to one more vacation. It wouldn't, couldn't, live up to the honeymoon. We knew that. But we hoped that it would all the same. We used that hope to get to sleep after the shouting.
We went down to Florida that year, and, well . . . it wasn't a bad vacation. It really wasn't. It just wasn't perfect. Once you've tasted perfect, it's hard to give it up. Nothing could live up to that memory. And that hurt us.
Every year it was the same, even when the bitch finally got the promotion, even when she got others, and the holidays got longer and the places got better. Each progressive holiday was a poorer imitation of that first one. The gap between hope and reality grew wider. The disappointment at the end of each year's grind grew greater.
My great great grandfather put every penny he'd made on the sale of the business in Cairo into the building of this one single manufacturing plant. It was to be perfect, he said. He hired a mathematical genius to do the architecture. Every angle was right, every slope a triumph of geometry. Every piece of machinery glistened with the sheen of newness. It was to be a marvel of industry.
Within three short generations my great grandfather and grandfather had run it into the ground.
My father declared bankruptcy in 1976.
We own a bodega now.
I find myself losing heart the deeper I go. The more broken down crap I wade through the more my spirit fails. The once perfect angles are now crumbling curves. They mock my family's dreams of recaptured grandeur. Every year the degradation of the place grows worse. The decay takes a little more of the building with it. Every year I come here, perform the rituals that are meant to stop the degradation of this world, and every year it seems more and more pointless.
There are seven Archons who help the demiurge rule the world: Ladabaoth, Lao, Sabaoth, Adonaios, Elaios, Astaphanos, and Horaios. All of them are forces of evil. All of them work to keep us in the material world, to prevent us from returning to the spiritual. I alone perform the ritual that holds them at bay, my father now too old to gain access to this building. The fence would defeat him. The world has fenced him out of the salvation he would bring it. It is this world that I save.
Each year I say the words I was taught, perform the actions I was made to memorize, but none of it means anything to me. I don't understand the dead tongue that I speak. I don't even speak modern Egyptian. I just go through rote patterns I keep struggling. But the world, this building, my life—they all just keep breaking down.
Eventually, the bitch and I noticed that we were avoiding each other, that the arguments were outweighing the make-ups. We struggled to save things. I don't know why. It's just one of the motions people go through.
We planned one final trip to Bermuda, one final attempt to recapture the magic. A full two weeks back at the same resort. We got excited about it even. In the month of build up I really began to think we'd pulled it back, that we'd finally found our way back to what we'd had.
After the first week of the holiday, she left me.
It wasn't anything specific. The sun shone the same way, the air blew just the same. Everything was as we'd left it. But time had passed. We'd changed. Whatever we'd had, had decayed.
The bitch took a flight back twenty-four hours before me, and when I got back to the house she'd emptied it. Taken her stuff and most of mine. Not just smashed my shit and left it, but taken it and tossed it. I had to take the bitch to court to get compensation, and I still didn't get enough to cover half of it. She's breaking my back with maintenance.
I never found the time to get back to business school. I work every waking hour in my father's fucking bodega, cursing all my histories. My life's shit, a hollow battered out shell that I keep rattling around in out of habit.
And you know what? As I approach the room my great great grandfather had his genius architect build at the center of his factory, at the conjunction of numerous ley lines, as I kick through paint peelings and discarded cans of spray paint, I think, what's the point? Why do we keep on struggling? What, except habit, keeps us going back to these places? What keeps me saving this world? Why not give in to the inevitable decline?
I come to a halt at the threshold of the ritual chambers, my footsteps dying away, my impetus for forward motion draining out of me. I cannot go on with this.
But the sight of the room catches me, and I do not turn away.
The room was built with a skylight. It's long been broken, and the pale afternoon light drifts down into the decaying space in long, lazy shafts. Everything is quite clear here.
The room is not how I left it. Over the course of a year someone has transformed the room, and made it into something else.
Something better.
The room is now just one vast piece of graffiti. No . . . that word is wrong. It is urban art. Or maybe just art. Or something else.
The whole place is dominated by a vast, pink-red, Hallmark-inspired heart, lurid in its depiction and overwhelming in its scale. It is too garish to be beautiful, but care and talent have gone into its depiction. Across it in flamboyant script are written three simple words:
"I forgive you."
The Monad created a final pair of Aions and sent them to the material world to help us battle the Demiurge and his Archons.
My father has worked his ass off and just bought our family a second bodega. He's hoping to start a chain.
The heart's message is not for me. I know that would be too much to ask. My ex-wife wouldn't know which end of a spray-paint can to point at the wall. No, this message is for someone else, someone else who has committed some crime, whose histories have weighed them down, someone else who has stepped onto the path of degeneration. But this other, this stranger has been given a second chance, they have been allowed to start things over. They have been allowed to make things better.
They have been given hope.
And knowing that is enough.
I step into the room and set about saving the world.
Jonathan Wood is an Englishman in New York. He lives on Long Island with his family and keeps 80 monkeys chained to typewriters in his garage. He passes their work off as his own. Their less coherent meanderings can be found at The Rambles of My Headspace.
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