And Those Who Watch

Nathan Blaustein was a short man, with narrow, seemingly inert ice blue eyes that nevertheless were penetrating. No one closely observing him as he stood mutely taking in his wife Bea’s histrionic distress would make the mistake of thinking him unfeeling. For there was something in the way he watched her, in the way the muscles in his neck, still wiry despite his seventy years, moved slowly up and down as he swallowed that said here is a serious man. Here is a man not to be taken lightly. Here is a man to be treasured as a friend but dreaded as an enemy.

Susan, Bea’s best friend, was doing the active comforting.

“It’s the world, Bea, it’s the world,” she was saying over and over again. “The dirty, rotten world and all the dirty, horrible things in it.”

“Down the rabbit hole she has gone, down the rabbit hole to hell,” Bea said, her voice hoarse from crying. “And her own mother, our own Dahlia, Nathan, she tells me ‘All the kids do it.’ She tells me. ‘All the kids, it’s what they do.’ And all the while she is crying inside, Dahlia is. I can see her heart breaking. She is a mother, and this is her baby and down the rabbit hole to hell she has gone.”

Bea gave Nathan a beseeching look as she hugged her friend. Nathan looked away, at soup on the stove that was rapidly boiling. He lowered the flame to simmer.

“How is it that you know?” Nathan asked.

Bea gave a shuddering nod toward the tablet on the table. Nathan took a step toward the table.

“Nathan,” Susan said, “you do not want to see.”

He stared at the electronic device for a long moment. “You have seen yourself?” he said to both women. His wife doubled over with sobs, nearly retching.

“We’ve seen enough,” Susan said.

“Like animals,” Bea croaked. “Just animals.”

Susan said, “We called Rabbi Koestler. She said she would come over.”

Nathan nodded. “I will go now and talk to Dahlia.”

His wife looked at him through heavy tears and reached out to him. He took her hand and squeezed it hard. “Tell the rabbi I will talk to her, too, later,” he said.

At Dahlia’s house, which she shared with Mina the problem granddaughter, at last his daughter stopped denying, dissembling, deflecting. Then the tears came. This Nathan did not enjoy. He remembered her as a little girl heartbroken that a little boy had paid no attention to her at a fairground. It was painful to see one’s little ones in pain. Inevitable, but very painful. This present horror now, however, was much, much worse. Inside the house, the sound of a mother’s agonized weeping. Outside, cars glided along the road, the evil world oblivious.

“She’s what they call a ‘starlet,’” Dahlia said when she had become calmer. She gestured to indicate the house they stood in. “She makes a lot of money.”

“It is not to be used, this money,” Nathan said.

“She pays the mortgage on this house with it. She bought her car with it. She has fabulous clothes from ridiculous places in Beverly Hills. Oh, Daddy, she is a stranger to me.”

“You live in her house, Dahlia.”

“I do, yes.”

“You must move out. You must get out from under that money. You must tell her that what she does to get her money, that that is why you are moving out.”

Dahlia covered her face. Then she said, “She said she is going to do it only for another year or two, maybe three.”

“It is already too late.”

“She does hate it, Daddy. She does, she knows it’s wrong.”

“Yet she does it.”

“Yes, but only for a little longer. And she hates it. Daddy,” she said, “Daddy, sometimes when she comes home, I hear her upstairs, throwing up. And crying.”

Nathan blinked at this in silence. Throwing up, he repeated to himself, silently.

Aloud, he said, “That is her soul crying.”

“I know it, Daddy, I know it.”

“Do you know where she works? Who her associates are? Who does this business, this filming or taping or whatever it is they call it?”

Dahlia said that Mina had mentioned a few names, a company or two. Nathan told her sternly to gather specific information and to be certain of it, no mistakes allowed.

“Why, Daddy? What are you going to do? What can any of us do? It’s legal. She’s over eighteen—”

“Something. I will do something.”

The way he said it stopped his daughter. Her eyes grew large, and she began to tremble.

“Daddy you are scaring me.”

“You, you have nothing to fear. Should you be ashamed? Yes. But afraid? No.”

He gathered her in his arms and kissed her forehead like he had done when she was a little girl, too, too many years ago.

Rabbi Koestler was first incredulous, then reluctant. Believing that reluctance was closer to willingness than to refusal, Nathan persevered.

“Tell me, Rabbi, that it is better to let it go on than it is to try and stop it.”

“Stop it, I heartily encourage,” the rabbi said. “Get the poor girl out of that filthy business, by all means. But what you propose? Even if it is possible--”

“I believe it is possible. I know a bit about these things. My father—”

“I know all about your father, Nathan. About your father, the less said the better.”

“Perhaps, but still I know. I am my father’s son, and here you are talking to me. My father’s eldest son. The one closest to him.”

“Nathan, I just don’t think you should dabble in things like that. It’s craziness.”

“Oh, I’m no dabbler.”

The rabbi looked into Nathan’s face. “Well, try as you might, it won’t work.”

“If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work,” Nathan said. “But you will say the words with me? You will do the ritual?”

“It would be so false. I just can’t—”

Nathan repeated what his granddaughter Mina’s specialty was in her recorded performances. As she listened, the rabbi pressed her lips together and stared at a point infinitely distant. Nathan moved to try to look her in the eye, and the rabbi shifted her gaze to avoid him. She ran her fingers through her close-cropped hair.

“They have it coming. All of them,” Nathan said. “Those who watch such things, who find pleasure in it, I can do nothing about, only God can deal with them. But the makers of the monstrosities? The manipulators of my granddaughter and other girls like her? They can be dealt with. It is worth trying. Well worth trying.”

“But Nathan, it’s already out there, in the world. If you take a goose down pillow to the upstairs window and dump out all the feathers into the wind, can you then find them all and stuff them back in again?”

“No, you can’t.”

“Right. Of course you can’t. So. What you’re advocating is pure vengeance.”

“Justice.”

She cocked her head. “Nathan. Vengeance.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “You have your Marcia,” he said. “What is she, nine, ten years old?”

“Eleven,” the rabbi said.

“Tick, tick, tick…,” Nathan said. “What they do, Rabbi, what they do.”

She looked into his eyes.

“Tell me this, then, your old fool,” the rabbi said. “Say you are successful. How do you protect your granddaughter from it?”

“I will have her…” Nathan searched for an acceptable word. “Exudate. And I will do the prayers the right way. We will, together. It will shield her.”

He held out his age-spotted and wrinkled but still strong hand to shake on it.

After a long breath, the rabbi took it, weakly, and nodded. “I will join you, Nathan, but only to be there for you when you become upset that it doesn’t work.”

Nathan shrugged. “We will see about that.”

Dahlia was shocked and angry. They were in the sunny living room of the house Mina’s outrages paid for, by the bay window overlooking the quiet Sherman Oaks neighborhood.

“I will not do that,” Dahlia said. “I can’t believe you are asking me.”

“Not asking,” Nathan said. “There must be something from the targets in the mix.”

“Holy God, I should not have said anything. I should have just lied and told you it was all just malicious gossip.”

Nathan held out a small plastic vial. “I only need this much.”

Dahlia launched herself from her seat.

“Get out,” she said.

“I will get it myself, if you won’t.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“Then see it you will. I will be in my car in the driveway until she comes home.”

Dahlia screamed: “Get out!”

He waited in the driveway. It was only a short while before Mina in her red Audi Quattro returned home.

“Poppy!” she said, upon seeing him. In the short few moments before recognizing him, he took her in. She wore tight clothing that emphasized her figure, revealed most of her breasts, the outline of her sex between her legs, the lithe muscle tone of healthy youth. He searched her face for marks of her hellish existence but could not see any. He was surprised at himself, expecting that he would. But then, the wounds would be much deeper, under the skin.

He seized her arm. “Inside, upstairs,” he said.

“Hey, what’s going on?”

He did not answer as he pushed her, protesting, then struggling, into the house.

“Your grandfather has lost his mind!” said Dahlia, wine glass in hand, as they entered.

“Mom, what the fuck?” the girl said.

Nathan muscled her upstairs to the hall bath. He thrust the plastic vial at her. “This. Fill it.”

“What. Are. You. Seriously the fuck talking about?” his granddaughter said.

“Did you just come from ‘work’?”

She squinted at the derisive tone. “Um, yes.”

“Did you do a shoot today?”

That stopped her. “What do you mean— I mean, what do you know about it? Hey, I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. I have over a million followers.”

Nathan mouthed the word ‘million’ to himself silently, tucked it away for later. Then he said, “You don’t know anything about anything.  Though you know too much. Too much.” He put the vial in her hand. “Fill this.”

“Again, Poppy, what the fuck? You want a urine sample?”

“Not urine.”

Dahlia had climbed the stairs now, spilling wine. “You leave her alone, she’s tired.”

“Not urine?” Mina said. “Then what?”

“What you vomit every night when you get home. What you take in from those scum, that you then regurgitate while you weep.”

Mina’s eyes shot towards her mother, and she swore under her breath.

“I hear you, Mina,” Dahlia said. “When you come home, in the bathroom -- I hear you…” Her mother broke down again in tears.

“I don’t believe…” Mina said. “You’re both out of your fucking minds.”

Nathan seized her shoulders and told her what he wanted the fluid for. She laughed. He told her again. Dahlia screamed. Miina continued laughing. Again, he told her. And again. He swallowed the pity that came with the contempt borne of the knowledge that she, having done what she had already done, could be talked into doing literally anything. He told her again. Again. He kept telling her. Until she was crying and out of expediency, he hugged her and told her that if it worked it would all be over, and he would help her. He would help her move and change her name and pay to have as much as possible erased from the internet so she could start over for the most part free from this awful thing she had done. She pushed against him and punched him in the chest and tried to shove him down the stairs as her mother sat on the stairs and wept but he stood firm and told her again. And told her again. And again, over and over. And then held her as she cried. And whispered it, again. And whispered. And pushed the vial into her hand.

And let her close the bathroom door while she struggled. And filled the vial. And thrust her hand out from the bathroom, unwilling to look at him.

“One last thing,” he said.

To her waiting silence on the other side of the door, he asked, “Where, and when?”

And in a voice that sounded very young and broken, she told him.

He took the vial home and as arranged met with the rabbi late that night.

Nathan knew the prayers. He knew the formula. He knew the ingredients necessary. The rabbi was the so-called official, but he was the one leading with true ardor, with wholly invested spirit. He could see the rabbi was not believing it, that she was fully secular, the sort of religious who was more a social worker than a preacher. She was humoring him with her presence, believing it would not work, and no harm would be done other than assuaging a deluded old fool’s rage. It would have to do. Let the kindness with which she believed she was deceiving him be enough, second cousin as it was to the righteous anger he felt in his bones. He had no other choice. No one else to consult. His father was long dead and among his associates his father had been by far the youngest, so all of them were long dead — and Nathan had not had occasion to keep in touch with any of their descendants. But he knew what to do with a certainty born of implacable conviction.

They were in an empty garage of a house that belonged to a friend of his, who was away back east. The garage was roomy, only one car in it, tools hung neatly on pegboards on the wall, some bicycles, ice coolers for trips to Tahoe in the summer.

Nathan began by directing the rabbi in the first prayer.

“Your Hebrew is better than mine,” she said.

“Stop with the comments,” Nathan said. “Begin again.”

She took a deep breath and started again to recite the prayer aloud.

With a match he lit that first prayer, which he had written on an ordinary piece of paper himself, and tossed it on the heap of common soil doused with the contents of Mina’s plastic vial that they had formed on the floor of the garage.

The rabbi repeated the prayer, and he stirred the ashes into the mixture with a stick.

He told her in Hebrew to repeat the prayer, and she complied. He continued to stir.

He put down his second piece of paper, burning, and again mixed it.

“The second prayer,” Nathan said, and together they chanted, over and over again.

They chanted for an hour. The rabbi flagged, Nathan encouraged her, and they chanted more.

Before she could say, “It’s not working,” he slipped the final prayer out of his pocket.

“Last one,” he said, and lit it. Tossed it. Watched it burn. Mixed in the ashes.

“There are three. I thought there were two--”

“It’s the first one again,” Nathan lied. “Remember?”

The rabbi stared at him, looking uncertain, and then cried out when the mixture on the floor before them began to move on its own. She grabbed his arm and ducked behind him.

“N-Nathan! Oh my God.” She looked into his broadly smiling face. “Do we… Do we have to… Do we have to… mold it?”

This was the part he was unsure of. A true master of kabbalah would have the power to direct the formation mentally, through strength of will. At least, that was what Nathan believed to be the case. But he was not sure.

“You don’t know?” the rabbi said. She was trembling. Nathan could see she was about to cry. He put his arm around her.

“Look,” he said, “it seems to be taking… some kind of form… all on its own.”

Together they watched, cowering, as the elemental mixture churned and swelled and subsided and churned some more. And grew.

“The prayer, the first one — let’s keep reciting it,” he said.

“Why? So, it won’t hurt us?”

“To reinforce. I think it will reinforce it.”

She clung to him. “Okay,” she said.

They recited the prayer and recited it again, over and over, as the being slowly became itself before their eyes.

It was not at all what he had expected, what he had thought it would be from all the stories, even the old silent movies. No tall stocky stone man with thick cut hair in bangs across his head, like a helmet.

It seemed to be mostly a mountain of eye, taller than a man. A single eye, great and oblong, with thick-skinned lids that hid all but a slit of the light-collecting organ. Apart from the eye, it had grown a bulbous red sack that hung in front, that Nathan took to be a kind of heart, guessing vaguely from its overall shape and its rhythmic pulsing. Lower down, it moved on a kind of stalk that grasped the ground wetly, oozing a pale viscous fluid the nature of which Nathan was not keen to know.

“It’s a monstrosity,” the rabbi said in a whisper.

“Yes. But it’s our monstrosity,” Nathan said.

He went to the side of the garage door and pushed the button to open it. The mundane mechanical sound of the door sliding open seemed dreamlike against the echoes of chanted prayers in his mind.

He approached the monstrous thing and draped a beach blanket over it. He turned to the rabbi. “You have to decide now,” he said. “Do you come with us? I understand if you do not want to.”

The rabbi stood in horrified indecision, unable to answer.

“I will take it to the car and come back for you,” Nathan said.

He approached the monster and touched it gently. “This way,” he said, gesturing toward the driveway where his car was parked. He could feel the thing looking at him through the slit between its eyelids. After a moment, it slowly surged forward, snail-like.

He opened the passenger side door and invited the thing to sit down, if sit would be the right word for it. The thing bent at its center and after a few moments it was more or less sitting in the seat. Nathan took a deep breath and reached across it to fasten the seatbelt.

“Can you speak?” he said to the thing.

It looked at him and slowly shook its enormous eye “no.”

“But you can understand my commands?”

It nodded.

“Right. Good. Let me check the rabbi. I’ll be right back.”

As he approached the garage, Nathan looked back at the car and at the thing in the passenger seat silhouetted in dawn’s first light, not quite believing what they had wrought.

“There is so much about the world I do not know,” the rabbi said in a more composed way than Nathan expected. “I will come with you.”

“Good. Good, Rabbi, good,” Nathan said. “Go around the driver’s side and get in the back seat.”

On the way to the address Mina had indicated, they had to roll down the windows because of the smell. Upon arrival, they parked across the street.

“We have to wait,” Nathan said. “Try to sleep.”

The rabbi snorted. “Yeah, right.”

#

About noon the cars started pulling up. Mostly men at first, ordinary-looking people, likely behind-the-scene types. Cameramen, lighting technicians, make-up artists, even a so-called director, Nathan supposed. Then some conspicuously good-looking people, young and fit, male and female. The talent? Would that be what they were called?

Nathan and the rabbi and the thing in the passenger seat waited until no more cars seemed to be arriving.

Nathan looked over the car seat at the rabbi. “Shall we?”

The rabbi was without words, which Nathan took to be consent. He got out of the car, moved his seat toward the steering wheel so the rabbi could climb out, and went around the front to the monster’s side and helped it out onto the street. It moved slowly, leaving a trail behind it, but its movement was also inexorable, Nathan noted with mingled anticipation and satisfaction.

At the front door Nathan undraped the monster and threw the blanket on the lawn.

“Destroy,” he said to it.

He nodded to the rabbi, who rang the doorbell.

The thing surged forward as the door was opened by a plump young woman with a clipboard, in plainclothes, clearly not a performer, Nathan presumed. She gaped as the thing peered at her, its eye widening, the pupil moving up and down her form, its dangling heart appendage pulsing and turning purple. Then it slid past her into the house.

“What the…?” the young woman said. “Is that a costume? Fuckin’ L.A., always a surprise.” Nathan and the rabbi pushed past her, ignoring the young woman’s entreaties until she hollered, “Albert, porno-gram for you, I think! Did you forget to pay Evil Angel again?”

At the end of the hallway a large man appeared, presumably Albert.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. He stopped in his tracks. “Wow. Um. Can I help you?”

The monster moved faster now, toward Albert. Nathan could hear its heart-thing hammering, could see from behind its eyelids splaying wide, exposing fully the divinatory orb atop its decidedly not divine body.

It bore down upon Albert who had time to scream only once before the monster disgorged a yellow-white deluge of suffocating fluid that enveloped his head, and then the thing pinned him to the ground with its overwhelming bulk. By now others had gathered and were hollering and calling out and running in all directions and then screaming when it was clear that Albert was dead, drowned, asphyxiated, choked. Punished.

One by one they fell as the monster surged forward, as Nathan chanted like a war cry his exhortatory prayers. One by one the monstrous instrument of vengeance peered into the souls of those present and rendered verdicts, sorting damned perpetrators from fools, the manipulated, the feeble of mind. By the end only a few of the nude young women and the one who had first answered the door with her clipboard were free to go. Some sat and stared in shock, others whimpered.

Nathan and the rabbi stood among the dead pornographers and breathed, the monster, now still, beside them.

“I guess it worked,” the trembling rabbi said.

Nathan spoke Hebrew to the monster, which turned to face him.

“What’s that?” the rabbi said. “I didn’t catch that.”

“It’s the third prayer I snuck in,” Nathan said. “‘And those who watch.’” He peered into her face, exultant. “I spoke to God.”

To the monster, he said, “Go on. Do your work.”

And stood aside as it slid past, back down the entry hall and out into the world, seeking anyone who had dared to indulge in what it existed to destroy.