The cluster
The triumph of evil in the western front
’’ Put down your Steinbeck and Faulkner folks, Cormac McCarthy writes about the real Americans. McCarthy understands what it means to be the crude and rough degenerates that we all are. Admit it. You want to kill people, and you'd do it if you could get away with it...if you could just leave the body in the unexplored desert of the West. ‘’
-Female reviewer on ‘Blood Meridian’, taken from ‘Goodreads’
She fell asleep that night, complacent and ecstatic, over a deed perfectly executed; she got rid of Max Norman, a heretic that threatened to end her world. In jubilation, she went to REM. But, unexpectedly, a nightmare crawled in her bed. It wasn’t the feeling of guilt that brought it; Alice felt none, it was something else.
On empty desert asphalt, a man stepped out of a shimmering mirage and walked towards. A denim clad cowboy, with a hat casting shadow over his face. A dog emerged from the mirage and followed him; stopping left and right from the road; sniffing. A feeling of discomfort ran through Alice; she was afraid of this image for no apparent reason. As the man got closer she saw his face; ill, wax-like, typhoid face; eyes sunken to the skull. And all of a sudden the man was standing naked in front of her; his body looking like bodies of those unfortunate victims of German WWII concentration camps that Alice saw on TV; skin and bone. She awoke in the sweat-soaked bed; the dream perturbed her deeply and she wondered why did it come to her in the moment of her triumph.
Alice believes in the prophetic power of dreams; she sees this as an omen. A message for her that something, someone is coming.
The Man and the Cluster that follows him. The eponymous Cluster. Man’s name is Lado. She met him, days before her dream, when Meg brought him home one night, drunk, and he probably was too. A chubby young man, closer to Alice’s age than to her mother’s. Short hair, white face, red lips. Face of a child. Meg took him to bedroom and closed the doors. Alice despised him, she didn’t know anything about him, but she despised him, because she despised everything of Meg’s.
In the morning, when she got up, she saw him in the kitchen, sitting at the table and eating dry cereal with a spoon. A golden necklace shone around his neck, and a bracelet from his wrist. ‘One straight outta ‘Jersey shore’ ’, thought Alice.
‘Good morning’, he said, in an accent, Russian accent, by Alice’s judgment, or one of those. He wasn’t from around here. Dark Alice didn’t reply. She wasn’t a friend, or a courteous fellow being. He got that, and just kept eating. Alice took milk out of the fridge, and made some cereal for herself. But, something about him, didn’t allow her to hate him, and she pushed the milk cardboard towards him, for his cereal.
‘No, thank you’, he said, ‘I don’t like milk.’
Meg started bringing him home more often, and just like with all previous, leaving him there when she was working. So it happened, the day after Alice’s dream that she was left alone with Lado. She sat in the corner of the couch, coiled like a black purring cat, watching TV. Big and heavy, Lado joined her.
‘So, are you like some wiccan, or somethin’?’, he asked.
‘No. I’m a Satanist.’
‘Oh.’ Lado was surprised. If there’s one thing that all the books and movies and everything else, thought Alice, it’s that dark sides are cool, and Alice was determined to get herself the darkest possible side, and make herself special. ‘Don’t you have those in Russia?’
‘I’m not Russian.’
‘Why did you think I’m wiccan?’
‘Because it’s a girl thing, feminism and all that. You’ll hate me for saying this, but Satanism is just a sex fetish, there’s nothing more to it. Nobody really worships evil.’
‘And older women would be your fetish?’ She made him feel uncomfortable. ‘Yeah, I bite back.’
Alice bit back at Meg many times and during one bitter argument, Meg threw a glass vase at Alice’s head. She missed, but the vase hit the wall, broke, and shards bounced back, and cut Alice’s cheek. Dark Alice wanted revenge.
Next day, Lado appeared in front of the doors, with a bouquet of daffodils and the phrase: ‘Is your mother home?’
Alice pulled him in, and forced herself upon him, unbuttoning his pants.
‘Is this some satanic thing?’ He asked.
‘Indeed it is.’
‘I guess your mother is not home then’, said he, and wanted to leave.
Alice stopped him, apologized, and asked him to stay. She acted all broken to get his pity. She fixed him a drink, vodka, with crushed sleeping pills.
‘I don’t think this is such a good idea’, said he.
‘C’mon, don’t you Russians like vodka?’
‘I told you, I’m not Russian.’
‘Toast for my mother, a wonderful human being.’
They clinked glasses together and Lado drank his poison down, when he tried to leave, his legs didn’t listen to him anymore. He fell down.
‘Let me help you’, said dark Alice, and dragged him in her mother’s bedroom, pushed him on the bed, and climbed on top of him. She smudged her black lipstick over Lado’s face, and his neck. With him unconscious, she made a dozen of cruel selfies, with her mother’s cell phone. Dark Alice’s revenge.
And then a strange thing occurred. In the already dark room, out of a power socket on the wall, a black shadow started growing and formed a shape of a man on the wall. The air in the room changed, and Alice couldn’t breathe, or move. On Lado’s bare chest, cuts and scratches appeared.
And then Meg returned, and saw her on top of him. Furious Meg grabbed Alice by her hair, dragged her in the kitchen, and started slapping her with the first thing she got, a bouquet of daffodils. Amidst Meg’s furious snarls and Alice’s whimpers, a stronger sound resonated the apartment and disappeared. The wall of the bedroom broke. It just ruptured.
Awoken Lado stepped into the kitchen and the kitchen walls cracked. He staggered out of the apartment, and down the stairs, leaving ruptured concrete behind him, as if he was in some pressure bubble that was breaking everything around it.
Whatever it was, it was gone with Lado, and Meg’s fury blazed again. She dragged Alice out of the building, and threw her things at her from the balcony. She told her she never wants to see her again. And so, Alice had become just another stray dog on the streets of Detroit.
Injured and scared, she walked with her things to that cold house at St. Cyril’s, and spent the night there. She hoped that when she wakes up, she would be in her bed, and that everything that happened would disappear like a bad dream. It didn’t. The next day, Alice broke into one other empty house at St. Cyril’s, that didn’t have its electricity cut off, and took residence there. At least, she can warm herself there.
She hustled some money from her friends, so she could buy food. She allowed a few days to pass, and then went to see Meg, and try to apologize. But, Meg wasn’t there anymore; apartment was empty, cold broken walls. Alice touched the ruptures with her fingers, and wondered what could have done this. She cried. She’s on her own now. She looked for a way out. She tried getting Max warmed up about her again, but his eyes couldn’t stand the sight of her. Even her friends started avoiding her, they started gathering at some new spot unknown to her. Nobody wanted Alice, not even the devil.
She touched a new low some two weeks after Meg kicked her out, when she robbed some small kids of their lunch money. She told them that she was a vampire and that sh
e would come drink their blood at night if they tell mom and dad. She saw Lado that day at the mall.
‘Hey, Russian!’, she called him, and he actually turned around.
‘Where did you and your mother go? You just disappeared.’
‘I don’t live with Meg anymore. I’m on my own now. And I want to apologize for what I’ve done, I’m sorry. I wanted to hurt her, not you. What makes it even worse is that I actually like you, I feel so bad about it.’ No. She doesn’t. ‘Let me buy you a drink. I won’t put shit in it this time, I swear.’
That drink turned into sex at Lado’s. She stayed over night. While he was sleeping she checked his place out. She discovered one locked room.
‘Wow, Jane Eyre-like’, she thought. ‘Secrets.’ She also found an anechoic chamber, with a drum set in the center of it. As she will come to know, Lado is a drummer in this band called ‘Amateur attempt’. They play every Friday at ‘The Fabrique’. They’re famous for their monstrous Elvis covers. There’s only three of them; Lado on drums, WB on bass, and Emil on guitar. Neither of them is from Detroit, they just happen to be here temporarily. ‘Columbia’ is waiting for their first album; they have quite a following on ‘Youtube’. Their success is in no small part due to Lado’s strong, fast hands, but the result isn’t exactly Buddy Rich, it’s some frenetic tribal sounds. Lado has a unique drum set, made for him by one Somdev Vidra, maker of exotic music instruments. Lado paid Somdev 800 dollars for it.
Alice and her dark side weren’t as nearly as interesting as Lado. She wanted badly an access to his world; she wanted to know his secrets. So she was sweet and magic and trepid and aerial, the way only females can be, she made him fall in love with her. She went through his computer, she wanted to know everything about him, she wanted to know what kind of pornography he watches, so she can turn herself into an object of his desire, and become his necessity, so she will never, ever be kicked out again. She failed to notice that Lado fell for her, back on the couch from her previous life. He saw a good girl that for some reason did her best to be bad. He found her beautiful.
He asked her to move in with him. Clever Alice replied she will, if he tells her what’s wrong with him. ‘I don’t understand what you’re asking me.’
‘You know what I’m asking you, when I drugged you, something came, some force that stopped my breath, something that left with you.’
‘That… I don’t know how to explain that.’
‘Try.’
‘It will come off weird.’
Alice was persistent. ‘You can confine with me.’
‘Okay… When I was a kid…’ He was obviously very uncomfortable to say it, but Alice was eager to know. Hundreds of things passed her mind in these couple of seconds. What? Some secret cult that actually connected with forces from beyond bestowed powers upon you? Stalin’s scientists experimented on your parents? You’re the antichrist embodied?! What?! Alice’s love for horror movies gave her a lot of ideas, but she thought of all the wrong films. Friedkin. ‘When I was a kid an exorcism was performed over me. First by an Orthodox priest, than a Jesuit, than Hoca. And, I don’t think it really worked.’
Here is Lado’s story as he conveyed it to Alice. When he was a kid, back in his native not-Russia, he lived in a village where everyone was his family. By all accounts, ‘the devil didn’t give him peace’, which means that he was hyperactive. He started having nightmares, in which he was scared of something and screaming, and people - his parents were dragging him into a church, while he was convulsing. It turned out that he wasn’t screaming only in his sleep, and the dream about being dragged to church become real. The priest ‘exorcized the devil out of him’. It was all fine for a while, until Lado, much like his father and grandfather, developed alcoholism. Then, his condition got monstrous proportions. As he said, a Catholic and a Muslim priest performed exorcisms over him. He came to the States, hoping to escape his problems, but he only made it worse, admittedly, he started abusing other substances next to alcohol. He claims that it’s all good as long as he’s sober. Dual role of the anechoic chamber was revealed; he closes himself in when he’s out of control.
That wasn’t enough for Alice, she wanted to know more, everything. What is it that’s obsessing him?
‘I don’t know’, said Lado.
‘You must have some idea, assumption’, Alice was persistent.
‘Priests said its demons, Hoca called it the jinn. One shrink I know, called it an illness of subconsciousness. I simply call it ‘the Cluster’, because that’s how many of them there is.’
Alice’s spine crawled. She was looking for the special one in all the wrong places. But, she was surprised to hear that Lado doesn’t believe in the devil.
‘Somehow, I feel that those entities are a part of my psyche, like someone ripped out parts of my personality, and only fear remained. But, it’s still me.’
This didn’t satisfy Alice. She read dozens and dozens of online articles about exorcisms and possessions, all of them regarded through the prism of Christianity, or Islam, few by skeptics, none by the group Alice identified with - Satanists. Nothing conclusive was said. She got jealous of Lado – he who wasn’t infatuated by darkness, or even acknowledged its existence, got to be touched by it. Why didn’t it want her? She offered herself to it. She found consolation in the fact that it couldn’t be mere chance that made them cross paths.
Lado saw no threat in Alice, he saw a fragile creature, pretending to be something else, like a butterfly when it spreads its wings. He didn’t take her seriously, or her creed. In fact, Lado was embarrassed of his illness, and he was sure that it will be gone, once he gets his shit together, and stops abusing substances. Then, he will be able to lead a normal life. Who knows, maybe with Alice.
A week, or two into their relationship, Alice got to see what is behind those locked doors. What was Alice’s Mr. Rochester keeping locked away? A man came knocking on the door when Lado was out, a man with two big black bags.
‘I need to see the Russian’, he said.
‘He’s not here.’
‘Well, what I am supposed to do now? I came for the frankincense.’
‘For what?!’
‘Herbal frankincense.’
She didn’t have any idea what he was talking about, and she would probably have slammed the doors to his face, if Lado didn’t appear and tap the man’s back.
‘I’m here, Moth,' he said, took him inside, and unlocked the mystery room. The man filled the bags with small packets of something, paid Lado and left. Alice took one of those packets in her hand, but she couldn’t read anything, it was in Cyrillic.
‘What is this?’
‘Herbal frankincense’, said Lado.
‘A drug?!’
‘Air freshener. What people do with it is not my concern. It’s legal, and it’s making me money. Help yourself if you want.’ But, unlike Lado, Alice much valued her sober mind.
Friday came, and Lado took Alice to ‘the Fabrique’, to his band’s gig. He introduced his girlfriend to B and Emil, two red-hot comets. B, a horny satyr, dedicated the first song of their gig to Alice, ‘the priestess of Hekate’, Funkadelic’s ‘Alice in my fantasies’. Compared to them, Lado was sir Lancelot. She couldn’t take it anymore when they started howling ‘Blurred Lines’. Her stomach turned. She left. After the gig, to celebrate another successful performance, ‘Amateur attempt’ got intoxicated on Lado’s frankincense. Later that night, Emil and B brought Lado, who was screaming his lungs off in his native tongue, and closed him in the drum room. Alice witnessed him screaming, convulsing, and standing on his head. He was being whipped by some invisible forces; cuts appeared all over his body. She felt that unholy presence again, and it froze her.
In the morning, Lado took a shower and made himself a sandwich. Like nothing happened. ‘Lado, what the fuck?!’
He said, ‘
Do you know that without the manic revolution speed of electrons, a human beings size could fit in the eye of the needle? That’s all that matter is, dance of electrons. And we don’t get to see behind the curtains of this theatre of life, beyond this dance, to see is there something else behind the world of matter. And from all the matter in the world, this ‘something else’ found me as its entry point.’
Alice wanted desperately to talk to that ‘something else’, to communicate with ‘the Cluster’. If Christians are right, than it is what she thought it is, the other god.
That morning, a crazy idea flashed through her mind, what if she could hypnotize Lado, put his sober self to sleep, and communicate with what’s left?
Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, tells the story of a man on his deathbed, being put under hypnotic state during his dying moments, and his spirit staying with the body after his physical death, until released by the hypnotist. In 1845, when the story was published, many people believed it to be a factual account of an exact occurrence. People thought hypnosis was able to do the supernatural, and Alice needed it badly to be true.
That same day, she started teaching hypnosis to herself. She watched several ‘Youtube’ videos, and got the basics of it. Now, she needs someone to practice on. After school, she took Keira and Jessica with her to desolate St. Cyril’s, where she can practice in peace. She understood that the most important thing is to make her subjects believe she can pull it off. That’s probably why it didn’t work on Keira, she found it funny and couldn’t get over that. But, it did work on Jessica, and Alice, to check how strong the trance is, asked her to slap Keira’s face. She gave her a good slap. Alice was happy.
But, then she got scared. What if it really works on Lado? What then?
That man came again. Moth. Lado was absent again, he was jamming with Emil and B.
‘Hey.’ This time there was no need to explain who and what he’s looking for. This time, Alice knew where the key is. He filled his bags and gave her an envelope with cash. ‘Thanks. Moth. I need to ask you for something. A favor. I need a gun.’ He stared at her evaluating the risk of arming, what seemed to him, an emo kid. He took two Benjamin bills back from the envelope, said, ‘I’ll be here tomorrow’, and fluttered away.
The next day, just as Lado left, he knocked on the door. ‘Have you ever fired a gun?’
‘No.’
‘Locked, unlocked, slide, release, click. And boom. Have a good grip of it, it blows back. It’s yours now’, said Moth and fluttered away again.
Mel Gibson’s Blood Meridian was on the tube that night and Alice watched it with reverence. But the first couple of bloody scenes angered Lado, and he didn’t want to see anymore. Alice, used to horror movies, wasn’t fazed by screen violence. For her, it was the truth.
‘This is bullshit!’, spoke Lado, ‘An illusion of purpose of someone who thinks himself better. That’s what clicks with you, isn’t it? Because you’re special, right? Well, newsflash, girl, you’re not! You’re just a swarm of electrons like us others! And there’s nothing your colors can do about it. They just make you look stupid.’
Her eyes teared. ‘You’re an asshole.’
‘Well, at least I’m not worshipping an imaginary principle!’ He waved off, and closed himself in the drum room, and practiced in peace.
His insults resonated in her head on so many levels. At a level, he implied that Alice and Mel Gibson, a devout Christian, are the same, looking for a principle that makes them special, although they stand on the opposite sides of good-evil spectrum. Lado’s nihilistic attitudes towered over hers. Although she was fully subscribed to darkness, darkness wasn’t interested in her, but it was interested in Lado, who doesn’t believe in anything. Maybe Lado is right. Maybe those are all just abstract concepts. Just a swarm of electrons.
No! She will show him how wrong he is! Tomorrow is Halloween. Alice’s friends are preparing to mess with Ouija boards at the cold house at St. Cyril’s. If Max Norman was still with them, he would probably prepare something more ceremonial.
Lado doesn’t recognize Halloween. They don’t celebrate that holiday in his part of the world. He felt bad about making Alice cry and wanted to apologize when she returned from school. But, surprisingly she wasn’t mad at him when she returned. She said she wanted to hypnotize him, and try to shut off ‘the Cluster’. She said she hypnotized people before.
‘It’s not going to work on me, I can’t be hypnotized.’
‘Well, can I at least try?’
‘Have your fun.’
Alice closed the curtains of the bedroom and muffled the Sun. She had Lado sit on the floor with his back against the wall. She sat in front of him, and had him close his eyes. She tried getting him under with the same method that worked on Jessica; having him lying in nature with wind in the grass, crickets and wing flutters. He just scoffed and opened his eyes. ‘I told it will not work on me.’
She tried again with a different approach and again and again it just didn’t work on him.
‘I though you trusted me, Lado.’
‘I do.’
‘Okay. Go to that moment that happens every night as you’re lying in your bed, when your mind is in perfect balance, in silent peace, that moment that has to be reached if you want sleep to come to you. Every person in the world knows how to get there, so do you, Lado. Let the focus go. Everything is slowing down, and then it’s gone. Tell me where you are, Lado?’
‘I’m sleeping.’
It looked as if it finally worked. ‘Okay. Do you trust me, Lado?’
‘Yes.’ She took a moment to gather her courage. ‘I want you to go back to sleep, I want to speak with the Cluster.’
‘No.’
‘It’s okay, you can let the constraints go, I am here and I will take care of it. Let go, Lado. Let go.’ Something was happening with him. He twitched, hit the wall with the back of his head and opened his eyes.
He stared at her, without blinking, without moving a single muscle of his face. Maybe it’s just an act. ‘Lado?’ No response came. The air of the room started choking her, things started appearing at the edges of her visual field, but she couldn’t see anything. Something stared at her from behind Lado’s eyes. The reality of the room seemed so fragile now, it pulsated, Lado’s electrons are barely holding the fabric of matter.
‘Cluster’, she gasped. ‘I searched for you. Satan. I know who you are, I will give you blood, rivers of it if you would just take me. Take me.’ Not a single muscle of his body moved.