Smog - Baggage of Enternal Night (13 page)

Chapter 6

I
wanted to tell Joey what I found out and, like I promised, I said I’d return.
So an hour later I stood back outside his apartment. It was quiet, and I
silently thanked whatever angels were hanging around that he wasn’t still
playing those damned records. I knocked twice and tried the knob. The door was
locked. I could have let myself in again, but I didn’t want to seem like a
nosy-Nelly, constantly checking on him, walking into his home whenever I felt
like it. Anyway, I figured he was probably sleeping.

Another reason I decided to turn tail and get away
quick was that I felt its pull again. The turntable was still spinning, still
calling to me. It might not have been playing at that moment, but I knew it
sure wasn’t “off” either, in the sense of regular mechanical devices resting
sedentary while not in use. A part of me began jonesing to hear it, a
slobbering, sweating part that somehow slid Joey’s key up into my hand and
lifted it to the lock. I thought that must be how an addict feels, a fiend
shootin’ heroin into his arm every day who decides to go clean, until someone
dangles a needle before his eyes.

A whisper snuck into my ears.

Ne zaderzhivat’sya v kholodnyy
i temnyy, ho prisoyedinit’sya ko mne v svet navsegda.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I bolted, just
turned and sprinted like Jessie Owns in Berlin. The whisper’s allure didn’t
lessen until I rose in the elevator two floors above.

Back in my apartment I deadbolted the door, then
paced between boxes, feeling my heart beat staccato. I went to the largest
window and gazed outside for several minutes, letting the oceans of blue sky
wash away the jitters. Most of the other tenants had views of identical
apartments across the street: faded gray produce shops on the bottom level,
stacked on top by floors of living quarters for the low-income populace of the
city. Fortunately, my apartment’s windows faced an empty lot, a barren space in
the commercial quarters like the missing tooth from a child’s mouth. I had as
nice a view as I could hope for and, unobstructed, my place was kept well-lit.
The early afternoon sun poured in, splashing the living room in soft hues the
color of melted butter, and I began to feel better. I pushed aside a kit of
build-your-own globes, set the pillowcase and records down on the kitchen
table, and settled into my easy chair.

Though I wasn’t in the reading mood, I looked at
the book I bought from Vic. It was a biography of Rasputin, written by an
ex-disciple who only distanced himself from Rasputin’s teachings decades after
the mystic’s death. Quoted text proclaimed:
The shackles of my soul were
loosed, the blinders removed…

The front cover showed a photograph of Rasputin in
middle age, raising his hand in the air like the blade of a knife, and his
mouth gaped open in a great void as if the camera caught him mid-sentence. His
hair and beard were wild, like a billowing, unfolding creature. But it was his
eyes that were most disconcerting. Those eyes were bulging wide, so large they
looked as if a child had drawn a cartoon over his features. They were round
orbs of snow-white, with specks of coal as the pupils, arched upwards toward
the heavens. It was a sinister image, and I wondered not at all how he gained
his moniker, the
Mad Monk
.

I turned to the first page and began to read.

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin is
one of the strangest and most deviant men in modern history. He is remembered
as a Russian holy monk and prophet with numerous proven incidences of healing
that mystified the most educated medical minds of his time. He was also labeled
a charlatan who manipulated the suffering of others for political and financial
gain. Still today, he is regarded as a shadowy and furtive individual said to
have been in league with supernatural forces and granted mystic abilities in
exchange for dark servitude. The only fact which has been steadfastly proven is
that Rasputin possessed some abnormal power over Russia’s last ruling Emperor,
Nicholas II and his family, and was instrumental in the fall of the tsarist
government, which led to the collapse of the Romanov Dynasty in 1917.

Separating fact from
superstition and heresy is challenging, as much written documentation relating
to Rasputin has inexplicably been destroyed over the years since his death.
Even that which I saw and experienced firsthand while under his sway seems
difficult to believe and recite all these years later.

Rasputin was born a peasant
sometime between 1863 and 1873 in a small village outside Siberia...

I read further. Soft tick-tocks from the clock on
my wall punctuated each turned page. I had been familiar with Rasputin’s name
as a mythical figure footnoted in school studies I once skimmed over as a boy
but never read intimately. He had two siblings, both of whom died young due to
drowning-related effects (one drowning outright and the other from illness
contracted from near-drowning). Rasputin himself nearly drowned, but was saved and
thereafter began to portray indications of supernatural powers.

A court record found in the
crumbling vault of Verkhoturye Monastery states that while Rasputin was aged
“near-to-manhood,” his father, Efim, had his horse stolen. It was claimed that
Rasputin was able to envision the theft through a “sense known only to him,”
and lead armed men to a remote farm where the horse was found and the thief
apprehended.

When eighteen, Rasputin was
reportedly visited by the Virgin Mary and urged to join the Khlysty sect, an
outlawed religious group that practiced exaltation through sexual ecstasy. He
practiced his beliefs, “converting” the peasant women of each village he passed
through. Indeed, his surname, “Rasputin,” soon became synonymous in Russian as “the
debauched one”...

An image worked itself into my mind of Rasputin as
a conman, preying on the lonely borough wives whose husbands were conscripted
to labor or military service. Like hoods I knew in the shadows of Detroit,
those granted the cunning and discipline to evade scruples found life to be a
flea market, buying peoples’ trust with words flimsy as a three-dollar bill.
Religion and sex go hand-in-hand, after all, each just manners to escape the
difficulties of everyday life, to find meaning in a troubled existence.

I read on, absorbing the details of his life,
trying to understand the motivation behind stories of his exploits, his
wanderings and dark lusts. I searched for a common theme stitching together his
philosophies, failures, allies, and enemies; the cults he formed, the followers
acquired through practices no other human could replicate.

Rasputin’s rise to royal
influence came about through his healing of Tsar Nicholas II’s only son, young
Aleksei, who was dying from hemophilia, a medical condition that impairs the
body’s ability to stop bleeding. From that time forward, Rasputin was deemed a
“holy man” and a friend of the ruling family. His influence extended amongst
the Tsar’s wife, children, court nobles, and even bishops in the Orthodox
Church.

With his political fortitude
established, Rasputin began to preach openly and without fear of consequence,
of reveling in immoral acts and even consorting with spirits. He was found
guilty, though never sentenced, of raping a nun. He spoke with the dead, prophesized
the future, and ordered followers to his bidding, which included kidnapping,
assault, and even murder. His disciples came to be known as “The Misbegottens,”
and I shamefacedly admit to naming myself among their number.

During the onset of World War
One, in particular, the whispers of Rasputin’s dark servitude seemed true. I
was alongside him in Rome on June 28, 1914 and heard him speak in tongues never
before heard. Yet sailors in the middle of the Caspian Sea swore in court that
Rasputin boarded their vessel that very day and flew away on wings of black,
carrying off the third mate. On June 28, also, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of
Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo. Witnesses testified Rasputin chanted
strange words and stood next to the man who shot Ferdinand.

The outside world seemed to fall away while I was
engrossed in the book, and I lost track of the time that passed. My imagination
filled with Rasputin and the absurd accusations leveled against him. No matter
how evil the man’s motivations may have been, what was claimed he caused—and
was capable of doing—was simply physically and scientifically impossible. I
began to disregard the pages I read as mere tabloid fare, similar to the
science fiction books I bought from Vic. Just because a book title states it is
a biography based on fact does not mean it hasn’t been embellished with fine
words to attract sales.

I skipped a few chapters, skimming for anything I
could relate to…

By 1915, Rasputin claimed to
foresee his own impending death. He sought the methodology to remain living
even after dying, and became obsessed with the variants of immortality and of
finding the means for souls to travel between the worlds of death and of the
living. He said: “My hour will soon come. I have no fear but know that the hour
will be bitter for you. I will suffer a great martyrdom...and will inherit the
kingdom.”

During the last months of his
life, Rasputin was rarely seen, yet those closest to him vanished without
explanation. It was said that he collected souls to fulfill the great prophecy
of a vanished people.

I skipped more pages, until some compulsion caused
me to flip halfway through and begin reading in earnest.

...When encountered at night,
Rasputin was said to chant incessantly. He collected certain “words” according
to their etymology, and he filled them with dark power, the way other men might
fill a bucket with water. Such words that he spoke had much more meaning than
their surface definition. Words that Rasputin empowered could become an invitation
or a password, a remark shared like a secret handshake that, the more spoken,
grew only in potency.

Words like, ‘Vkhodite.’

My mouth unhinged, and every piece of baggage in
my apartment seemed to gasp alongside me.

For Rasputin, ‘vkhodite’ was
the ultimate communiqué of influence. Translating to “come in,” the word became
the banner command of submission and the proved intention to submit to his
discipline. Vkhodite meant to “come into” his world, his dogma. You were
surrendering yourself to a higher power, leaving behind the cold and fleeting
solitude of earthly existence for immortality under his command. In effect, he
was setting himself up as a god and his ‘Misbegottens’ his disciples.

Rasputin would induct his
followers as such: Ne zaderzhivat’sya v kholodnyy i temnyy, ho prisoyedinit’sya
ko mne v svet navsegda.

‘Do not linger in the cold and
dark, but join me in the light forever.’

My God, it was the phrase from the music! Vic’s
friend
was
right; it really was Rasputin’s records.

But if what this author—this former disciple—said
was true, how did the chanting on the records hold such an influence over me
and over Joey, who was becoming quite obsessed, just by listening to them now,
years later? Did those words really hold such power?

I knew then, that regardless of how much of the
book was valid, I had to find a way to convince Joey to get rid of the records.
The hoodoo-voodoo they spouted carried
some
sort of psychological
consequence. I thought about calling Joey and laying it all out, but how could
I convince him the few bucks he might turn on those records was worth the
effect of a brainwash? I decided I’d go down there tomorrow, take him to
breakfast, and lay it all out.

The phone rang, a shrill blast that caused me to
leap from the chair like a frightened child. Though it startled me, it was
nonetheless a welcome interruption from my dreary thoughts.

I caught my breath and answered. “Hello?”

“Hi.” It was Gail, and I relaxed. She was a needed
respite from what I just read. She continued. “What’re you doing today?”

“Just thinking about you,” I lied.

“Good answer.”

“Yourself?”

“I’m home from work early and wondering if you’d
like to come over for a Friday night date. I’m going to make chicken and
artichoke, and there’s a bottle of chardonnay that takes two to drink.”

I needed to break and take some time to
contemplate matters. An evening at Gail’s seemed like a shipshape idea. “Sure,
honey. Any special occasion?”

“Well…” her voice softened. “I want to talk. You
know, about us.”

Oh God
, I thought. ‘
The Talk
.’
What I first thought as a ‘shipshape idea’ now sunk like the
Titanic
.
Whenever a woman makes plans just to talk, it means she wants something that
requires a change of your lifestyle.

I gritted my teeth, but tried to keep my voice
upbeat. “I’d like that. What time were you thinking?”

“I know how busy you are,” she said. My anxiety
slipped into defensiveness, as if that were a barb against me for not having a
real job. Just thinking about
The Talk
flipped my emotions topsy-turvy.
She continued. “What’s a good time for you?”