The world seems like the Order, Stephen would say, and of course he wasn’t referring to the world as a whole but to ours, the world of young bohemian heirs, libertine and powerful, who had invented the London scene in the sixties. Radical political positions, hedonism, sexual promiscuity, weird clothes, kids with too much money: that stuff was similar to the Order. But the spirit of the age, the hippie canon, now that was identical. It has never been easier to blend in, said Florence, and that was partly why she allowed the young Initiates to participate in the ambient esotericism. People talked about thought police, William Blake, and H?lderlin at parties, they read Castaneda and Blavatsky, they looked at Escher pictures to stimulate their trips, they discussed UFOs and countryside fairies. It was common to smoke hash, and, while the pipe went around, page through Le mystère des cathédrales or argue over whether the best Tarot was Crowley’s or Rider–Waite’s （or, as Laura and I insisted on calling them, Frieda Harris’s or Pamela Colman Smith’s）。 The I Ching was consulted, the Ouija board used, trips taken to Primrose Hill where the ley lines started, demarcating a map with megaliths aligned across the magical territory of the islands; we sought the spiritual sun Blake had glimpsed. One morning, Sandy thought she saw a black light, the god Br?n and his crows, on Tower Hill. We went on the alert, but nothing happened. Tara, with her enormous fortune, brought us objects, rugs, and clothes from Morocco, her favorite place in the world, which I never got to see.
Our epicenter was Stephen’s house in Cheyne Walk, near the river in Chelsea. Stephen had chosen it because it had a staircase designed in the thirties by Sir Edwin Lutyens, with a marvelous iron handrail, and, underneath—because it snaked in a curve—a small table was placed atop some slightly arcane art deco mosaics. I moved in with him two months after I arrived in London. It was far away from St. John’s Wood and from Florence, but that helped me get to know the city a little. My bed was always littered with books and albums, like the beds of almost everyone I knew: it was a meeting place, a normal thing among the people who went from Mandrax to hashish, all that languor and lethargy we lived in. Sometimes when Robert spoke we couldn’t understand him, and he had to write down the dates and times of the concerts because his tongue got tied. Incense, Tiger Balm, and sleep.
Laura was the only one who didn’t lead that kind of life. She would lie down beside me, smoking tobacco, and take off the straight masculine pants she wore; I would admire her firm, thin legs while she asked me questions about Juan. She had never attended a Ceremonial, so she’d never met him. Laura was the adopted daughter of Anne Clarke, Florence’s aunt. She was missing her left eye and wore clothes that made it impossible to get an idea of the shape of her body: men’s clothes, and several sizes too big. Her hair was long, though, and always greasy, and she drank atrociously, so much that she tended to get lost, and Stephen would have to go out and search the city for her. He’d find her sleeping in a park or a cemetery, her favorite places, because Laura was, out of all of us, the one who had best studied communication with the dead, or, as they are called in the Order, the discarnate. Her hands would often smell of earth, and sometimes of blood; if she didn’t bathe, she could stink of decomposition. I took care of cleaning her, sometimes: I’d scrub her skin with the sponge and trace the scars she’d given herself when she got too drunk. We read The White Goddess aloud until the water got cold and then, when we dried off, we’d tickle each other and she would bite my ass. She still had her eyelid but refused to wear a glass prosthesis: she preferred a leather patch. I thought she was beautiful.
I met Laura at a ritual at Florence’s house and her ferocity shocked me: the way she used a knife to cut her arm, and shushed the woman who squealed when she had to cut her, too; the way she pronounced the words with authority and without wavering; how she stimulated me until the sexual energy became a palpable thing over my chalk circle; how she addressed the entity we summoned with surprising familiarity. Laura was infallible and demanded respect: she didn’t attend all the rituals, or agree to perform lesser spells. We used to walk around Highgate Cemetery and caress each other atop the graves. I confessed that George Mathers had been my first love; she regretted that the Order hadn’t recovered his body, which was buried in Nigeria.
In bed at Cheyne Walk, Laura wanted to hear about Juan. You know what he thinks about the words the Darkness dictates? I said to her once. Juan believed that the utterances were all in the mind of the scribes. Or, in any case, that what the Darkness said could not be interpreted on this plane. Laura turned over in bed, and her unbuttoned shirt revealed a tattooed breast; she tattooed herself, if she could, or else she asked a friend of hers whom I hardly knew, a fox breeder who read viscera as a system of divination, and who hated me because she wanted to be Laura’s only lover.
He’s right, she told me, and the smoke from her cigarette took on the smell of danger, because what we were saying meant shaking the very foundations of the Order: we were questioning the Book. She went on holding forth, fuelled by the alcohol, while I put on an album so we couldn’t be heard from outside. The Book contains fragments that are worthless, she was saying. There are passages of text that were supposedly dictated by the Darkness, but that are identical to fragments of grimoires in the Order’s library. Or that even copy modern texts more or less faithfully, texts from occultists in this century. There are excerpts from The Lesser Key of Solomon! “Ars Paulina” is there in its entirety. It’s clumsy. But doesn’t Florence know? I asked. And Laura would repeat: Florence is one of the scribes, at least when she wants to be. She’s a great woman, but it’s not the first time she’s been wrong, and if she admits any of it is fake, she has to also admit that the method to preserve consciousness dictated by the Darkness could be false too. And she can’t admit that, because she would lose her power.
When Laura said those things, I felt anguish. My throat closed off, my chest hurt. All a lie. The possibility of living forever, or at least a very long life, a lie. She kissed me on the lips, and as her teeth collided with mine, she’d say, I could be wrong, baby.
A cult that doesn’t offer everlasting benefits, or ones that last an unusually long time, does not construct a faith. And belief is nonnegotiable. Florence believed. She had to, not just to preserve her own power, but because she had destroyed her son in the process. Hermes is the god of writing, but he is also the god of falsehoods, I thought, but I didn’t say that to Laura: instead, I started untangling her hair, which was about to turn into the kind of dreadlocks Brixton’s West Indians wore.
Apart from my room, apart from my books, my albums, and my companion, Stephen’s apartment was glorious. Tara wandered naked among the clothes, the newspapers and magazines, the cushions and rugs. We were always on the floor, even to eat. Sandy wore white lipstick because she wanted to look like Juliette Gréco, and she listened to chansons while she read Camus. Lucie took our pictures without warning. Cheyne Walk was a strange mixture of velvet, William Morris, and some Victorian extravagance, like the obscene paintings Stephen collected, along with the classic hippie decoration of pashminas over lamps to dim the light, Moroccan hand drums, African masks, photos of Rimbaud, and architecture books. Stephen used to say that the tailoring of the time was the most exquisite since the Restoration, and I had to agree, especially when we were visited by David, a musician friend of Lucie’s who I thought was extraordinary, with his long blond hair and feminine blouses designed by Michael Fish. He was like a doll with strange teeth, so attractive that sex with him made me a little afraid—I didn’t want any infatuation with that boy. Once, I wrote his own name on his back, with ash, down his spine; there was something reptilian about David, even about his English teeth, what a national disgrace. That time, he started talking about mirrors, his fear of mirrors. I told him Borges’ story about the war of the mirror, how one day the silver was going to rebel and stop reflecting us, it would disobey and stop replicating our movements while we looked on, astonished and scared to death. And how the first thing that would appear, in the depths of the mirror, would be an unknown color, then the rumble of weapons and conquest. David sat in front of the mirror and looked for the color and I think he found it: he was on acid, as always and like all of us. He was afraid. Study, know, then dare; dare to will, dare to act and be silent!, I said, to soothe him. And he was soothed, and he fell asleep on one of Tara’s golden blankets, a blanket that was for Juan. We’re gathering his court, Stephen would say, the court of the golden god. When he comes to London, I thought, I’m going to wrap him in this blanket that smells of peaches. I missed him a lot but I never said so out loud. Secretly, I called him my Persephone. How can I get you out of hell? I can’t, I am one of the mistresses of hell, but hell has its corners, and we can rule there, rule and disobey. My grandfather used to read us Milton in the orchid garden, but Juan preferred Blake, and when he gets to London, I’m going to take him to see the Blakes at the Tate Gallery, and all the houses of the poets he likes.