City Series, part dos. Witch craft

I spoke of my friend and his exodus from our fair city. And so it goes, you may say, but though I may have not known all his reasons for leaving our country and still less about him moving to an anarchist coop in Barcelona—one of the few remnants of that city’s civil war legacy, its ability to dream even—something was more amiss than I let on. No, the real reason came to me in the form of a mutual friend who had worked with him on "x-project" and now needed to leave the country. He couldn’t leave by the normal routes, as one could imagine, being that he was wanted by more than one government agency. When his name was then placed on the witch list—you know, that list that changes via wants of those in power rather than actual definitions—I knew it was serious, and I knew that we would have to sneak him out via a ratline.

I didn’t ask questions as I sat there with him in the dark basements apartment in the Upper East Side. We knew some illegals who had ratlines out of the city via boat and onto a sailboat which would take him to Barcelona. There he would hopefully find refuge in the arms of the underground community of anarchists.

Having never been in the presence of a witch before (apparently, it’s all witches and no warlocks, sex be damned), I remained unbelieving, silent, and apprehensive. When the van came by around midnight, we still hadn’t exchanged a word. And as I ate our halal food—with that perfectly roasted spring chicken—his smoke filling the air, the van idling outside, I wondered how it was that he, a middle-class faithful, could even have achieved such notoriety.

In the van, hoods over our heads, he started to pray in some foreign tongue, or rather, in an odd combination of English, math, and programming descriptions. My nerves frayed, I finally asked him what he had done to result in his running out of the country like this.

Witchcraft, he explained with a smile. I didn’t want to believe him because my main impetus for helping him was that the witch list was in fact a false list used for political purposes. But his face was dead serious and sucked the air out of my lungs; I was unable to reply. Silence and the sound of the old van’s body panels rattling over potholes filled the air. I could smell something like cumin and blood. Soon we were at the boat house, somewhere in the Bronx. We had to wait for a gap in the boat patrols before we left.

I wanted to ask what kind of witchcraft but instead asked if the witchcraft was real, or if he was joking. His words were spoken like that of a man who knows there are only a few more moments left in his life: he explained that his was indeed witchcraft, but the kind that twisted a screen’s reality. What he and my friend in Barcelona—had done was to spread certain words, phrases, ideas into the wide web and allow these words to infiltrate any and all texts: focusing on communications and news stories. The result had been mass hysteria. But the thing about this spell was that it had become a life unto itself and so nothing was going to stop it—hence the reason he had to leave and why the friend from before had to leave.

And so it goes. I watched him leave on the boat and never really heard from him again. The effects of the spell he created were covered up with great skill, though one could never really trust what one was reading anymore. Not on a screen, at least.

And I was left to fend for myself, a writer using the specific tools of literature to cast spells. Or trying to, even though after hearing that witch’s language, and somewhat understanding its effects, I knew that I may very well be speaking a language that had weak spells while this new language, or form of language, or new religion, was much more powerful than that which I had at my disposal, and that any spell I had at my disposal would succeed only with wings from the other language. And I at once felt weak and impotent, imagining that this was how Neanderthals felt, watching the hordes of Cro-Magnum come through to crush them and their past.

I’m ranting now. I’m more or less thinking what it means to write, and to write fiction at that. What does it mean if it can’t cast spells as strong as I may want?
Enjoyed the writing? Please share it via email, facebook, twitter, or one of the buttons below (or through some other method you prefer). Thank you! As always, here's the tip jar. Throw some change in there and help cover the costs! Then Subscribe to my mailing list* indicates requiredEmail Address * First Name Last Name Email Format
htmltextmobile