Through the Doors of Oblivion Read online

  High above, beyond the fog blanketing the city, lightning flashed and thunder exploded so loudly half a dozen car alarms abruptly bleated and blared.

  The woman on the phone above them fell silent. Her phone clattered to the street from her third-story perch.

  The corner of California and Grant was completely dark. Madge could hear her own ragged breathing, and Iria’s, and a foghorn on a ship far out on the Bay.

  There was a cough from nearby.

  Madge stopped breathing and held her breath instead.

  The street lamps at the corner flickered back on.

  Neon signs blinked and returned to life.

  A squat, round man in a hodgepodge of military regalia from a variety of orders and services stood before them. His beard was a scraggly mess, his face was lined, his hair plastered to his head under a tall hat. The hat bore a bent peacock feather and a ribbon like they put on the prize-winning pie at a county fair. The man looked slightly bewildered as he stared back at them, then around, then did a double-take at the street corner.

  “Your Majesty,” Iria said, rising to their feet and then taking a knee.

  “Yes?” The man looked around again, then at Iria, doffed his hat, then went back to staring this way and that. “My heavens,” he said to no one in particular. He looked up at the face of Old St. Mary’s and that legend it has borne since the 1850’s: Son, observe the time…

  Madge held out a hand. “I’m Madge.” His Imperial Majesty didn’t respond - and didn’t take her hand.

  Iria stood again and smiled at the Emperor as they spoke. “I’m Iria,” they said. “I’m the one who summoned you. I thank you for being willing to return. I hope we have a lot of opportunities to learn from each other. And, of course, might as well get this out of the way, I will require certain tasks of you from time to time.” They shrugged down at Emperor Norton from their comparatively towering height of 5’11”.

  Emperor Norton blinked up at Iria, and when they said the last sentence, he stepped back. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I… I summoned you,” Iria said. “I command you now.”

  Emperor Norton took a deep breath and puffed his chest out. “I rather think not,” he huffed. “I have a debate to attend.” He turned from them, but turned right back and, lifting his cane to gesture at Iria with it, added, “And I remind you that though I seek naught but benevolence in the administration of my empire, it is generally ill-advised to seek to command a sovereign.” He scoffed at her, a little pah of breath, adjusted his hat, and turned away again.

  Stepping forward to cross the street, Norton glanced up at the street signs for Grant and California. He stopped, looked around at the surrounding storefronts, looked back at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral, studied the other buildings again, and then turned back to Iria and Madge where they stood in silence fading to embarrassment.

  “And furthermore,” he bellowed, adjusting the hang of his coat where it draped over him, “I seem to have lost my bearings and require you provide direction to the Academy. It would not do to be late, and you have delayed me with this silliness. And atop that, now I find myself standing at the corner of California and Grant, the latter being a street I confess I did not know exists in this fair city. I require you give me directions lest I assess the taxes for which you are undoubtedly in arears.”

  “Oh, you’re late alright,” Madge muttered.

  Iria folded their arms in what Madge recognized as extremely annoyed determination and said, “Okay, Norton.” Their tone caused the Emperor’s eyes to widen a hair’s breadth and his nostrils to flare. “Let’s go over this again from the top. You’re dead. We summoned back your ghost. You work for me now. Capiche?”

  “Also, they renamed DuPont to Grant, like, a hundred years ago.” Madge waved her hand at the street sign. The glare that passed between Iria and Norton, Madge thought, could probably have frozen molten iron.

  “Well, quite obviously I am dead,” Norton replied, unflustered by any measure. “That hardly keeps me from the duties of the crown. Now good evening.” Norton shuffled his feet as if building steam to leave.

  “And just to prove my point,” Iria said, expression still extra cross, “I bind you to this enchanted artifact and dismiss you until required.” Iria unfurled a poster-sized photo of Emperor Norton. It depicted him standing, in full regalia, his gaze turned to something off-camera and distant. The Emperor’s regal bearing and pensive expression made the portrait a little bit sad. It captured a person with a brilliant mind, one fully engaged, but engaged with something just slightly somewhere else, its wheels not entirely finding traction in the here.

  Iria threw the poster over Emperor Norton like a blanket, or perhaps a funeral shroud. It fell to the ground atop the star they crafted in chalk, swallowing Norton up entirely. A great gust of wind shot down California Street, sweeping the fog away hours ahead of schedule, as though the sky itself were puffing steam from the surface of a city-sized mug of tea. Within seconds, a clear sky of stars and the full moon shone above them. When Iria picked up the poster and turned it around, there was a new quality of fine detail and reality to the image. Emperor Norton was, put simply, trapped inside.

  “Well,” Madge said. She looked around. The runaways in St. Mary Square were gaping. Were those phones in their hands? They needed to get out of there. “That, uh, that went better than I might have expected.”

  Iria beamed at her, their eyes bright in the moonlight and the glow of the city. “Better than expected? That went goddamned amazing!”

  Madge cleared her throat. “So now what?”

  Iria couldn’t stop grinning. “Now we make him give us the keys to the city.”

  Not terribly far away, just the other side of Chinatown and down the hill, a thing called Mammon, which looked like a man wearing a green sportscoat with gold trim and silver lapels but wasn’t, sat at a low table in the far corner of The Saucy Sow. The Sow was an overdone homage to someone’s idea of an English pub for “gentlemen.” The wood was too polished, the upholstered chairs too showroom-perfect with their burgundy paisley patterns and their clawed feet. The wine racks were too tidy, the floor too thickly carpeted, the staff obsequious to a fault. It was what Mammon called “faux authentic.” It made him smile just being here.

  The hour was late, certainly, and the sign out front said CLOSED, but the bar still quietly continued serving a crowd of upwardly-mobile, adamantly posed tech bros and finance wannabes hanging around slapping each other on the back and talking about portfolios so nobody would think all their fraternization was, you know, gay or anything. These young men - and they were definitely almost all men, the women having grown bored and developed defensive headaches long before – passed the average business day alternately befriending and betraying each other every other five minutes on their way to a short-lived tenure at the top of what they imagined to be success. For most of them, that meant a promising career in corporate acquisitions cut short by an early heart attack, or perhaps getting in on the ground floor of a good idea and sticking with it just long enough to pull the plug on the hopes and dreams of everyone involved who actually worked for a living.

  In a city proud of its reputation as a haven for outcasts, these boys did the casting out. These were the people who wanted to spend a cool two or three million on a home across the street from the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park but would never actually go to the park itself “because of all the homeless people.”

  Already, the ones in their 20s were eying the ones in their early 30s like prey ripe to be clawed apart and devoured, their bones just another ladder to the top. It was the sort of crowd in which a 29-year-old would call the 30-year-olds “fossils” and “has-beens.”

  Mammon loved The Saucy Sow, and he loved this time of night most of all: all the inhibitions were down, all the teeth were bared, all the claws were out. Mammon looked around the bar at the clusters of loud-whisper-loud-whisper men, their intentions to devour and destroy worn so openly on their faces, an
d he thought not of finance or of deals, or even of predators and prey, but of the arenas of ancient Rome. There - oh, so long ago, and at the same time it felt like yesterday - money changed hands left and right as roaring crowds watched lions devour criminals.

  “And to think,” Mammon said aloud, “They called that civilization.”

  “Whaz…” The man sitting across from Mammon slurred, stopped, belched audibly, then backed up and took another run at it. “What was that?”

  “Nothing.” Mammon gave him a smile at least a quarter-inch too wide on each side. He pushed a piece of paper a little closer to the man and held out a pen. “Now, I believe we were ready to make this official?”

  The man blinked slowly, several times, his eyes turned in the direction of the agreement but not exactly focusing on it.

  “Look.” Mammon’s voice was sweet like honey. It even smelled like honey, if honey could go bad. “You’re never going to find anyone else who will give you this price for those buildings. And you know as well as I do they need to go. They cost almost as much to maintain as you get in rent every year and that block could be turned into modern apartments in no time at all.”

  “’S’gonna put some people out of their homes,” the man eventually said. He still wasn’t looking at the paper, just in its direction. “S’gonna be some bad press.”

  “And once you sell,” Mammon said, “That won’t be your problem. Listen, change is inevitable. San Francisco has always been turning itself upside down and remaking itself and fretting at every step along the way. This is nothing new. They’ll still be homes, just homes for different people. Richer people. The neighborhood will be drastically improved. Everyone says ‘gentrification’ like it’s a bad word, but just think of the small businesses enabled by the more affluent population around them. Change is the only constant, my friend. Trust me. Why, you should have seen what it was like during the g- ”

  Mammon’s eyes flashed, lightning reflected in the bottomless pit of his irises like a movie projected onto a tiny pair of identical screens. The reflection was so bright it illuminated the table for half of a moment. Mammon’s companion gasped a little. After all, The Saucy Sow had no windows.

  “Didjoo… see that?” The man didn’t sound like he could have seen much of anything, but his eyes widened and he seemed a little more alert. “That light?”

  Mammon didn’t look at the man, but he furrowed his brow. “No,” he said. “I felt it.”

  The poster went in a place of honor, as one might expect. Madge tore down a couple of the Marilyn Monroe’s and all the JFK’s. She decided to save that sort of tense energy for some other occasion. Madge placed Emperor Norton right over the altar she kept on the north side of her room and lined up a row of black beeswax candles underneath it: black for north, and for grounding, and for keeping bound that which they had summoned, and beeswax to perfume the air and sweeten the relationship they would have to this…

  Madge swallowed as she let herself think it: slave.

  “Technically I think he’s more of a tulpa than a ghost,” Iria said. It was like they could read the meaning behind something as small as Madge’s hesitation. The two of them clicked like that, always in harmony with one another even when they played different notes, even when the chord they struck was in a minor key. “You know, a thoughtform rather than the soul itself? We have a really strong idea of Emperor Norton based on the writing about him but, like you were saying about what he did or didn’t believe in terms of religion? It’s hard to know the actual person. There’s too much romanticism and fiction around him. So, when I set my intention, before the ritual, I decided what I wanted to get back was the idea of Emperor Norton, because all the stories about him make him seem like such a good and accommodating guy. What if the real Emperor Norton was just, like, nuts? What if he was a vagrant who got romanticized to sell newspapers? So I’m trying to build in some insurance against that.”

  Madge studied the lights of the Tenderloin through their small window. Cars passed beneath their humble home. She could hear the conversations of the people who lived on the street outside rather than in roof-over-their-head homes. The cast of characters out there shifted from time to time, but there was always drama, activity, and a sneaking suspicion on her part those people were the real San Francisco. Madge could, in theory, move any time she wanted, but some of the people down there had lived on this block for years. They just happened to live outside. “What if I’m having second thoughts about this project?” Madge turned back at Iria finally.

  “Tulpa,” Iria repeated. Their expression wasn’t hard, though. They considered Madge with their typical degree of kindness. Iria mostly showed the world a face ready to fight, but they always softened where Madge was concerned. “Not an actual soul. Summoning him up and having him do our bidding is no different than writing a story in which he does the same things.”

  Madge arched her eyebrows for a second, then lowered them. “Well, that’s one way of framing it.” She thought for a second. “Is that why he knew he was dead? You summoned him up out of texts about his life and his death?”

  Iria shook their head. “No idea. Maybe that, maybe just that he was always really good at, uh, persisting in a pattern of behavior despite the evidence of his senses.” Iria walked over and looked Madge in the eyes. “I say we give it a shot,” Iria said. “And if it doesn’t work out, we release him back into…” They waved a hand at the ceiling and the sky beyond it. “You know, wherever tulpas come from.”

  Madge sucked her lower lip for a second and then got a look of guilty mischief as she grinned up at Iria. “It was really bad-ass, the way the ritual worked so well.”

  Iria grinned. “It was.”

  “Okay,” Madge said. “Let’s get to know our guy.”

  Whereas capturing Norton had taken time and strenuous effort, when Iria summoned Norton back he practically burst into the room. They lit the candles, said the key they had set when they had enchanted the poster in the first place, and snapped their fingers - and just like he’d been sitting there waiting to be called, Emperor Norton stepped out of the poster, eyes alert, taking everything in with nary a moment of surprise or consternation.

  Norton was as he looked the night before: squat, round, with a bushy beard and hair, both black with streaks of gray and white, neither of which had seen a brush in a bit of a while. His dress was dignified if slightly ratty, a potpourri of military branches and ranks and insignias. He wore a long blue Union Army officer’s coat with white epaulets and cords of office, plus a few medals on his chest. Madge suspected they were not exactly government-issue. Norton had a cane and a tall hat, like a top hat but with a wider brim - the books called it a beaver hat – decorated with an unwieldy nest of peacock feathers and a blue and red ribbon. He was white but with very darkly tanned skin, and the lines of his face dug deep. He looked like he spent a lot of time outside. Madge recalled Norton was almost flat broke at the time he died: the total worth of his goods and cash came out to something like $10. He probably walked everywhere, and though San Francisco had a reputation for fog, it saw plenty of sun too.

  Norton twisted his mustache back and forth as he ran his hand around his lips. He drew himself up to his full height - which was quite small - and gazed across at Madge then up at Iria. “Ah,” his Imperial Majesty said. “You ladies again. Now, what’s this business of being bound?”

  Madge gritted her teeth.

  “Not ladies,” Iria said. They had that look of exasperation one gets when one has explained the same thing a hundred billion times. “Persons.”

  Norton looked from Madge - maybe 4’11” if she stood on her tiptoes - back to Iria, who was at least 5’11”. “You are not a lady?” He flushed and produced a flourish with one hand. “My apologies, sir.”

  Iria shook their head. “I identify as genderqueer. I don’t want to be referred to as ‘him’ or ‘her.’ I’m a ‘they.’” Shrugging sloping but wide shoulders, Iria flicked their long, black hair back
out of their white, untanned face. From their superior height, determined green eyes bore into his dark ones. “Got that?”

  “But are you a man or a woman?” Norton persisted, but politely. That was the thing that struck both Iria and Madge: he wasn’t getting it, but it wasn’t the obstinate, willful not-getting-it of someone trying to shame them for their identity. It was the not-getting-it of the innocently ignorant.

  “Neither,” Iria said. “Perhaps both. I’m me, not what anyone else assumes about me based on an arbitrary classification.”

  “Is this a matter of biology?” Norton’s tone was, still, nothing more than neutral.

  Iria arched both eyebrows and replied in a tone they worked to keep even. “No. It’s a matter of who I understand myself to be.”

  “Your Majesty,” Madge said, interjecting, “Who conferred the title of Emperor onto you? Who presided over your coronation?”

  Norton worked his beard this way and that again then met Madge’s eyes. “No one,” he said. His voice was a little smaller than before, but he regained confidence as he spoke. “I announced my ascension to the throne in the Evening Bulletin of 17 September, 1859. I required no presiding authority. I knew it to be right.”

  Iria nodded at Norton. “That’s me, and being a ‘they’ instead of a ‘he’ or a ‘she.’ I know it’s right, and everyone else can deal with it.”

  Norton looked at the head of his cane as he turned this over in his mind. Looking at Iria again he said, “And are you allowed to vote?” There was a sparkle of clever clarity in his eye. The question was a trap meant to force Iria to reveal their sex.

  “Everyone can vote now,” Iria said.

  “Well,” Norton tugged at the corners of his jacket, “though I do not recognize the legitimacy of the rump parliament calling itself Congress since the War, I am at least gratified to see my proclamation of suffrage for all has been heeded.”