The Heart of a Pig

Part II: "On the Nature of the Occult"

On the Nature of the Occult

Chris spoke. “I’ve always said that 99% of occultists are seekers after worldly power.”

He’d never said any such thing—not to me, anyways. This may sound strange to the outsider, but I didn’t know anything about Chris’s relationship to the occult, whether his interest was academic, whether he studied demonology or conjuration or if like any successful dealer, he made a point of not sampling his supply. It would have been uncool to ask, like one brain surgeon asking another if he liked rooting around inside his patients’ skulls like a truffle pig sniffing for tumours and blood clots.

That’s not quite it. If reading, as is universally agreed, is an intensely private experience, so much so then is the reading of occult texts, which speak, through symbol and incantation, to our deepest desires. What could be more private? I mean, what do we talk about when we talk about the occult? I was about to find out.

“Occultists go around calling themselves Mages or Hierophants,” Chris said, “and they obsess over the trappings of magic—the sigils and ceremonies and grimoires and secret signs—but when you strip away the high-sounding Latinisms, you’re looking at a bully desperate for a shortcut to power.” The cats were all watching him—they weren’t used to their human raising his voice. “One occultist wants wealth, another wants power over his fellow men. They want to lay low their enemies or for women to fall at their feet and give them a cosmically powerful orgasm. If the occultist considers the non-material world at all, it’s as a means for gaining power in this world.”

He paused to make sure I was keeping up. His knee was bouncing again.

“The realm of the spirits and demons,” he went on, “those worlds beyond the limits of our five senses—the occultist lights out for them to get rich. Fuck knowledge! Fuck self-mastery! They want gold and slaves. More power, more pleasure, more of what we moderns call life.” Even after so short a remove of time, I cannot adequately quantify the contempt Chris imbued in that final word. “The only thing distinguishing most of my clients from the classic sociopath is a lack of balls and backbone. They’re too cowardly or weak to just take what they want, say, like a crime boss would. So they summon a demon or elemental to do their dirty work, in hopes of becoming—I don’t know: rock stars, lifestyle gurus, billionaires. You know what I’m talking about.”

“You’ve basically described my clientele,” I agreed. “Though you left out the Crowley wanabees.”

“They’re a modern variation: the power monger with a sexual fetish and a juvenile need to shock his parents.” With a shrug of his shoulders, Chris had climbed down from his high horse and was ready to laugh at himself. I always liked that about him.

His attention shifted the three book piles on the table. When he reached for his stein, his hand stopped in mid-flight near the notebook on the middle pile before returning to its course. Then, for at least the third time, he glanced at the hallway beyond my right shoulder, which led to the bedrooms and bathroom. I wanted to follow his glance. I wanted to ask if he was getting enough sleep, but again: very uncool. For all of our counterculture credentials, Chris and I might as well have been men of an earlier generation, bound by convention to avoid all talk of personal feelings. We were men. We talked about things, and the thing we had in common—our esoteric corner of the book trade—was good for the length of a 12-ounce beer four or five times a year. When Chris finally lifted the stein to his lips, his bulbous knuckles were strained to white on the handle.

I took a sip. He took a sip. I took a sip. And all the time his eyes flitted from the notebook to the hallway behind me and back again, and those incessant glances, so out of character, made me feel like we now shared the apartment with a third presence, an entity buoyant enough to displace massive volumes of air and space. The effect was to shrink the living room in some way not measurable to instrumentation. To make me feel very cramped. An illusion, I thought, a projection of my paranoia.

Chris picked up the notebook, his fingers making what I calculated as the lowest ratio of flesh-to-paper contact possible. His strange expression—part disgust, part rapt fascination—further compacted the room.

Then one of the cats, an ancient orange tabby, let out plaintive howl. I sprung to my feet.

“Did you hear it?” Chris was still seated, but he faced the hallway now and the notebook was on the floor. “Did you hear it? The noise before the cat howled.”

I don’t know what I expected to see standing in the hallway when I turned around. I used to wonder if he stored books in the spare bedroom, and if so, what books? There were rumours. Please don’t let them be true, I prayed.

The hallway, as far as I could see, was empty. “Look, Chris…”

“Sit down. Please.”

“Is someone else here?”

“I don’t know. I mean—no, of course not.” His pleading gesture made me despise him. I didn’t like the version of Chris standing before me imploring my sympathy. He wasn’t living up to my expectations. I didn’t want his valuable books anymore. I didn’t want to climb from Number Three to Number Two in the bookseller ranks. I wanted this to be another evening shooting the shit with the man I’d half-idolized since I was a twenty-two-year-old with his whole life ahead of him. Chris looked old, not decrepit and broken down so much as mummified, his skin protected from decay by sinister magic.

“Please, sit down.” He’d mastered himself. “I think we need another beer.”

So we’re really doing this, I thought. We’re going to talk. So I sat down. What else could I do?

Part III of The Heart of a Pig, “The Client,” will appear some time over the weekend. Keep the comments coming. I always love to hear from readers.