BRICKOMANCER
THERE'S A DEMON-POSESSED Karen stalking you as you set the waxed canvas ruck down on the sidewalk with a clink. She thinks you’re here to tag one of the walls out behind her remodeled brownstone, and you can see the self-righteous anger brewing in her posture: back rigid with indignation, Ray-Bans pushed up over the blonde highlights, and a confused but redolent Maltese pants from the heat of the Manhattan asphalt from its throne inside a chunky Graco stroller.
“I called the police,” the woman snaps.
The Maltese growls at you, and one of the yellow bows holding its hair back flops to the side.
Adorable dog.
“What do you have in there?”
You look down at the bag.
“You have spray cans in there?”
Her voice shakes. She’s scared. Looks on the edge of tears, and she’s pushing them down by shoving the white hot poker of superiority, nosiness, and entitlement up to buttress the rigid, royalist bearing she projects out onto the world around her.
You look back at the canvas bag full of cheap Krylon cans.
This is going to make painting the anti-summoning symbols onto the corner of Chewie’s bodega really fucking hard.
“You’re live on video,” the woman says. Her head tweaks back and forth to emphasize her words. “This is why property values suffer here. There’s no pride of place—”
She has a lot to say, but you tune her out like you do the Mad Russian when he starts wandering up and down the D train. One hundred streets up the line and a thesis on satellites that take control of your minds. Fun stuff the first few weeks, you split rent with five roommates, but after a while it’s just the background noise of the commute, like metal on metal screeches, the sway of the car, and the tired look on the faces of all the houseworkers and nannies from seventeen different countries on the way back up the island to cook dinner for yet another set of hungry mouths.
You look down at the Birkenstocks you scored off the boutique thrift shop around the corner. All the best stuff in the used stores around this place now. Rich people toss out the best stuff. Nice shoes. You found a Gucci purse there that could hold a can for emergency touch-ups, but the ruck is best for more complex work.
But despite the comfortable shoes, you know if you leg it she’s gonna send your video to the local police and they’ll come knocking at the already-busted-in door on 205th, take you in, and then Yesse’s gonna fucking bail you out and tell you all about how you’re disappointing your poor, departed mother, God bless her soul and the Mother Mary—
No.
“It’s okay.” You fold your arms. “Let’s wait for the cops.”
It’s a gamble. A big fucking gamble. Where, you wonder, is Chewie? Because, you swear to God, you’re going to shit on his mother’s grave if he doesn’t show up soon.
You hear the siren warble around the corner. You feel the pit of your stomach lurch. You’re imagining all the brutal shit you’ve heard, and now in this day, you’ve seen with everyone else on shaky handheld videos. This Karen might yet be setting up to record the next horrible beatdown.
Or worse.
And if those sigils don’t get touched up soon, well, the evil gnawing at the back of this Karen’s eyes, that dead look behind the colored contacts, that evil would spread out even farther into the world again.
So in the ruck are a set of spray cans and a book of Enochian summoning scripts that your mother spent half her life reverse engineering from the 1500s occultist John Dee’s books of angelic script. You’d spend half the day down at the New York Public Library, the Main Branch, past the magnificent lions. She’d read, take notes on a battered old Moleskine, while you colored with crayons and watched the tourists noisily clump on past to take photos against the hand-carved, wooden backdrops.
Sometimes an old white man would stop and stare at you both, your skin as dark as the varnished bookshelves holding the weight of human knowledge. Stuff you thought was old and musty at the time. Mom paid them no mind. “Mija, listen, we have work to do, and getting distracted by them is what they want. They can’t touch us in here.”
At the time you thought she meant tut-tutting racists couldn’t touch you all in the library, so you hid in libraries whenever you could, as if a book could hide you away.
Much later, you come to realize she meant the demons had no power there, because the Main Branch ceilings project nullifying energy that dissipated demonic interventions.
In third grade she got called in because you drew a set of pentagrams and a perfect summoning grid on a poster board for show and tell. When you connected the final Enochian binding call to the fifth cell, the power to the school flickered out.
Just a coincidence, the teacher said. But you couldn’t be bringing pentagrams to a Catholic all girls school. No more. They’d put up with this immigrant stuff enough, and young souls were at risk.
They are at risk, your mother agreed. Very much.
Never mind that Becky had a sleep over two weeks ago where everyone used a Ouija board to find out if the boys over at the Episcopalian school liked any of them.
“I don’t want any of this for you, Julia,” she whispered to you on the subway home. “You shouldn’t have been reading those books.”
But they’re everywhere in that small apartment. When the power went out because she couldn’t afford the electric, the candles sat in little dishes on top of books about the occult, flickering away. They seemed more malevolent and mysterious in that yellow light that could never be pinned down, locked in some back and forth eternal struggle with the shadows.
You’d give anything to spend a night again in that old apartment over the widow Lester’s creaky old house with no power, the mold crawling back up the wall behind the toilet, the heat baking you so hard the windows warped, and eating baked beans straight out of the scratch and dent can as a curtain of her dark hair fell over whatever occultic book she had ready for the evening.
“I always remember, Mama,” you whisper whenever you load the spray paint into your scuffed up ruck. “I’m still doing the work.”
“You think you’re some kinda fucking Banksy?”
The cop is out of his air conditioned car and already sweating in the heat. The wards are getting battered down, and you can feel an oppressive weight in the air.
This patch of sidewalk behind the bodega and the brownstone is balanced on a knife edge. The people in front of me don’t have the tattoos etched in cremated ashes that let them see the tall creature just behind the brick. An armored shell of a demon, a core sigil burning it into being.
It wants souls. It wants to suck the life out our husks.
It wants blood on the street.
You could have run. You could have let it ooze out of the brick and fully possess the people here. But you’re betting on Chewie. Because, even though you want to slap the twitch of that woman’s lips right off, and you fantasize about taking that cop’s hand off his holster to snap it in two, you know it’s the energy swirling in the air that has the back of your mouth acidic, your heart hammering, and your vision blurring.
Add more rage into the loop and it’ll spin up enough energy to snap the veil between the worlds.
“What the fuck is this?” The cop holds up your notebook, open to a grid diagram.
“Art,” you say, voice level. He cuffs you, has you against the car. You shiver with indignation, because none of this should be happening.
He steps forward. That dominating pose, and mirrored sunglasses frame your round, tired face back at you. The fourth-wheel earrings, their pattern just barely able to hold back the demonic energy that spills into the air between you, flash and twinkle.
Those patterns run all over the island. All over the world. Hundreds of years ago, Masonic planners in shadowy rooms behind taverns met to layout the city grid using occult patterns to create energies that would hold entire cities in their grip. In ancient times, they burned cities to the ground for practical reasons: to destroy the portals and energies unleashed by their street grids.
Since the time of Sumer and ancient Babylon, whole populations had been held in thrall by the patterns laid into the corner stones of the first cities. It had never been farming that dragged humanity out of the hunter-gatherer mode, but shamans, their minds grasped by entities far out the guttering lights of dying stars, that established cities long before farming came.
Why did witches live in forests and holy men in caves outside the chaos of cities? Why did Jesus have to live in the wilderness, or the Buddha seek out a tree far from the teeming masses of his India?
Even white people know that here in New York City, Robert Moses and modern day city planners lowered bridges so that buses couldn’t go certain places in NYC. The cities today haven’t changed much about it redlining, carving up the land in their patterns, they just feel guilty about it and talk about it a lot.
Your mother fought a war in the seventies. “See that car,” she’d say, and point out a tagged up, omni-colored subway car with almost no silver poking through the bubbled sigils. “Every time it makes a loop around the city, it reestablishes a closed circuit that protects us.”
Once you saw the protective shapes, buried in the work of a generation, you saw that the island was covered in protection.
Now, gentrified block by gentrified block, you had all lost so much of it.
From the finance district out, those people once holding the knowledge, the Romani, the brujas, the old world witches from Ukraine, the hippy crystal-loving artist grandmothers cooking up a cauldron in the back of a squat in the Garment District . . . all forced out by redevelopment.
“We’ll lose the soul of the city again, one day,” your mother said.
But not here, Mama, you think.
Not entirely yet.
“Oye! What’s with the cop?” Chewie shouts from around the corner.
He looks out of breath, his face red, and hovering somewhere between apologetic, which you think is aimed at you, and angry.
The cop sees angry, and pushes me to the side. He’s been buried in his rage, and only just now realizes that more people have spilled out onto the street to stare at the scrum of people.
Phones are out. Even retired old Narovka from across the street has the new phone her grandson gave her in hand, and she’s shakily recording everything.
“Chewie! Slow down,” you snap. You try to get to him, but also, project calm.
“That’s Julia!” someone else says. “Why he got Julia handcuffed?”
The rage has spread. The brick wall pulls at them, like a vortex. And the helplessness, the hurt from past arrests of friends, family, people that look like them, it boils around us.
And the thing on the Other Side wants that. It used the Karen at first. Racism was its favorite fuel, an art perfected in the 1800s by its kind. And the cop has been trained to fear us, to use violence as a tool. He’s spent his life being told we’re the enemy, that any second things could turn.
You can see his eyes dart about. You can see the far back erosion of soul, a lifetime of drip, drip, drip that left the once innocent boy who may have played with a black friend in Kindergarten, but is now surrounded by neighbors who say Those Things, and watches a single news channel that preaches from the dark sanctification of Fear, Subjugation, and Order, and he’s trapped in a pattern laid out by suburban planners of swirling ticky-tack developments that created who he is now: someone who comes in from outside of this block to patrol and occupy it.
“I told you,” you say calmly, like talking to a wild animal. “I have permission. This is the bodega’s wall. That’s Chewie.”
“Don’t film!” the cop shouts at someone. “Get back, you’re interfering with an arrest.”
But they all have the phones out.
And for all that hatred in the air, you can taste love. Community.
Yeah, you know, it’s a whole lot of woo-woo.
But if there is hatred, there must be love. And if there is an individual, there has to be the opposite, right? Community?
These are people you’ve known your whole life. You’ve pledged to your mother to keep this block safe. To keep the bodega a castle against the unseen forces that want it gone in favor of a chain. A chain grocery store that would take this point on a line, a pattern that stretches over this country, and complete another part of a dangerous grid that would snatch a small piece of a person’s soul every time they stepped into its repetitive similarity.
“Please,” Chewie begs, taking a deep breath. “I hire her to paint my store’s logo up there. She’s family. Please.”
You hate that we have to beg for dignity, beg to be allowed to do what others never even have to ask for.
But the cop shakes his head, broken from the spell as Chewie gets close to him. Chewie’s an empath, a healer. He’ll get you the right herbs, the right medicine, or listen to you talk at the end of the day about how bad it was. He’ll send you on your way with a lightness in your step and a bag of groceries. You can pet his familiar, the bodega cat, on the way out.
“Okay,” the cop says.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” The woman rails at the cop, shouting, almost spitting at him.
“Ma’am—”
“Do your fucking job!”
Her dog barks at him.
People drift away, a few stop to rub your arm, commiserate. The moment has passed. Chewie hugs you, sweat and Axe deodorant choke you for a moment. “It keeps the small demons away,” he claims.
Some day, Chewie won’t be here. Narovka will pass. You certainly can’t afford to live here anymore. E Pluribis Unum used to be a motto for the land. It’s not a bad one, and for a moment, here, it was again.
For now.
You get your on-sale Krylon cans back, and re-tag the protective wards on the side of the bodega, and the Karen glares at you in deep hatred from her stoop.
Fuck her, she doesn’t know what she’s missing. Chewie invites you back into the store, and you all hold an impromptu potluck lunch. Friends and family cluster around, gossip, and hug.
It’s not a bad life if you have a community.
You can get through it with a good pattern.
Tomorrow you’ll be over in the Flatiron District to fix the tags on a playground at the invitation of Rabbi Hoffman. You have to keep fighting the fight, building alliances, or the darkness would break on through.
But like your mother, and her mother before you, you’ll carry on. Every little bit moves the world forward.