The Party

One

Cecilia took her meals in a nearly empty drawing room adjacent to her bedroom. The help brought her the fruits of a brief afternoon of preparation and stood by as she ate, taking robotic and slow bites while watching her phone, propped up horizontal on a saltshaker. From the third floor window beside her, the first early snowfall of autumn was falling, wet half-liquid clumps of snow unceremoniously smacking into the still orange October leaves, slumping over the crisp autumn like a sweater soaked in water.

“Cissy?” Her mother pushed the door to swing open, staring her down with indifferent surveillance across the carpet.

“Mom?”

“You’re not dressed yet.”

“For tonight? I thought I didn’t have to go to that.”

“It’s our house, honey. You need to at least make an appearance.”

“How much of an appearance?”

“Can you at least put a dress on and then we can talk about it from there? Just enough that someone sees you. I can’t have you holed up here all day.”

“I will.”

“You said that this morning.”

“No one’s gonna be here until this evening! It’s barely afternoon!”

“By four. Come and see me, we can talk more about this.”

She left, letting the door swing to rest unclosed on the latch. Cecilia kept her eyes on her phone, chewing with tensed anxiety at the barrier left imperfect.

Two

It was still too warm to consider ‘going out’ an event worthy of ritually swaddling in the coatroom, putting her in a chilly battle against  her own will to withstand the barely freezing breeze in her sweater and pajama pants. In the semi-trampled forest paths of her own making surrounding the house, she sipped off an energy drink, listening to the slush melt to water in the creek behind her. The ground has yet to freeze, still unsolid enough to accept the melting water and turn to muck and puddles that were already beginning to dampen her shoes. Snow was still falling like drops of rain, plopping to water upon contact. She regretted forgetting a rain jacket, taking another sip as a great gob struck above her ear and chilled as it dripped to her neck beneath her hair.

A pair of fairies alighted in circuitous mid-air ballet air before her. A ring of mushrooms was still alive beneath the sudden cold beside her, suddenly seeming vivid against the brown and orange and white backtones, the snow inside seeming drunken by the Earth faster than anywhere surrounding. Cecilia took another sip and relaxed, shutting eyes to extend to the nearby tree. From the roots to the sky, she traced its paths, communication with neighbors up to the highest sky, touching the sublime in every point, the drunken sugar, the glory of the infinite wind, the pleasure of touch in the root network, each leaf shaking in impact, falling off, shed as it turned from green to orange to brown to ground.

“This happens once a year, doesn’t it?” Cecilia said, reaching out to something before her, a human presence without coherent form yet.

“Yes. The October snow is an important time, an intermission of a few days winter before the real frost comes.” A woman’s voice, chopped in the frequency at strange intervals as if spoken through a sieve, the sound of her voice like rustling trees or rain.

A drop of snow smacked her temple, dripping down beneath her hair to fall to her collarbone and ice her skin deadly-pale, the pain dragging her body down once again. A hand of ancient flesh took her to the apex of a ridge adjacent to the manor, overlooking the river horseshoeing around the property’s extensive valleyscape, white falling over autumn orange to mix into November’s mudded brown to a smog-grey horizon. The hand guided time back like a clock wound counterwise, tracing time back up her palm. A deer stalked through a hidden glen, taking up the mass of a thousand grasses to fuel the heat of a chase, as wolves closed it down to bloody abattoir. On another plateau of the forest’s breath, a spark shot over the branches to cast a blaze, flames licked up the boiling screams as grass perished to dust. When wind cleared the excitement, the trees drank deep and bloomed anew orange, mushrooms came up and from their circular growths, fairies alighted to dance on rounded stones, eroding, withering beneath the grindstone of the river. Sand particles fled out to the sea from the rocks now half-smashed by water, flitting down to the bottom’s sands. A farmer plants his crops upon this fertile graveyard as Lake Agassiz has lone gone from memory.

“Some people would think this to be a bad omen.” Cecilia said, coming back to her eyes as her companion relaxed supine on her open palm.

“And why would that be?”

“Autumn dies early. Last year the autumn snow never left, the trees died before they should have, birds didn’t get a chance to migrate. It got cold too quickly.”

“Is cold death?”

“Some would say so.”

“Remind them, Cissy. Death is a human delusion. A comfortable one, one that makes the pains of life go down easier, one that makes the soul feel all the more singular, but nonetheless… Remind them that the only ones who die are the ones who hold belief in death at all.”

Three

Assembling one by one in the front of the house, the guests arrived like a funerary convention of the waiting-to-die. The ancient, the ruined, the engorged, they were deformed in various ways well beyond what should have been the halfway of their life, cackling over their poisons like gargoyles of American sin. They animated briefly, in their handshakes, bangles swinging off dressed hands and gloves being shorn off to show watches sweeping through small talking conversations, coats given off, individual meetings in private corners, Cecilia watched the help - the one she’d had an eye on for weeks - from the upstairs balcony. For him, it was catnip. She saw over his shoulder, even interrogated him on occasion, his fascination, his belief to be undercover in the secret world of the powerful. He was rolling in pleasure here, acting out his fantasies of jumping at shadows to see the Weishaupt's ensign flown up on the television with his name in bolded letters.

How she wished she could live in his world! Overweight men, bloated in the scum of overseeing contracting, wire-thin lawyers who come in their trousers driving through their daughter’s sorority, his eyes showed with childish glee as he imagined them about to don masks and robes, sacrificing some virgin as he watched, phone camera at the ready. To stand by the side of some permanent society in service to the horrible divine, to indulge her darkest urges in utter darkness, to have the freedom, the safety, the life of utter contentment he imagined her to have.

For Cecilia at least, she could escape into his delusions long enough to feel secure, like the bannister won’t collapse under her leaning, like the floor won’t crack to nothingness the next minute or the next hour. But would it be enough to last? They were nothing three generations ago and even in all their splendor, they owned nothing. They had no history, no truth, they paid their way into the halls of power, pretending to be in the same class as those whose family name was etched into the door in the era when the globus cruciger still flew as a solar emblem over Europe. They made their money in liquid cash, floating on the services performed for fees, her father’s medical practice and her mother’s corporate climbing ultimately no better than those they looked down upon and who would eat them alive if given the revolution to do so. And what of it after the end? Will they outlast Rome, or will they perish and become buried under volcanic ash and tells of forgotten pillages? Was this the first generation of primitive accumulation or the flash-in-the-pan of a briefly enriched middle class, fat on the excess of forces far outside their control?

She took another dip into the hors d’ouerves tray floating about and crunched into some momentary peace, hoping to preserve forever the singular instant when the food dropped like nectar upon her tongue. But she swallowed and the future ticked on. The party moved and with it the clock, terrifyingly forward. Outside, the snow was still falling, wet death separated by what? The thin walls of a house constructed not twenty years ago? How much kept them in that house? How much kept them from whatever may lay outside, whatever barbaric state of frigidity the rest were all condemned to?

“You look nice, dear.” Her mother held her lightly from behind, a ghostly half-hug to show affection before slipping away into directing the morass of the crowd.

Four

Staggered in the rectangular order of chairs around the dining table, several stand out, their form in the same style as the others, but elongated, the backs heightened past that to which a normal person would sit, thus shrinking their stature to the eyes of the guests. Around the table, while food is passed around, those seated in this chairs are marked out for this, the back and their form melding together as one shape rising over the heads of all others. It is these chairs for which the guests of honor are placed into, inducted into the mysteries of the house and put to stand before the eyes of all assembled, primary of which, the house itself.

Like a masonic ritual over the checkered floor, the help was intoxicated as he listened furtively to the conversations, not remarkable so much for their content, but the mere fact of their happening, the basic notion of contact from one to another above a certain net worth exceptional enough to prove himself right on everything. A pastor took his place on a highbacked chair to meet his obligations dutifully, accepting each passed around plate, eating with manners and perfunctory benefactions interspersed in each remark expected to be given. His wife was obedient beside him, the true focus of his obsessions, making sure she remained on-script for the night to function accordingly. A businessman in between formal titles at the moment made remarks back and forth, bouncing upon the ears of the VPs and private owners around their small city, joking in the jockish way they had been trained to, reciting plaques and idols erected on their desks from the crackling radios reciting game statistics over their factory floors, the sound coming up from electric undercurrents like an emanation from an underworld emerging into the world as little fuzzes and crackles of the announcer’s voice. A colonel and two captains traded applause, passing the buck of standing for performative adolation across their seats, bouncing the hot potato of rehearsed toasts for the assembled guests, all standing to politely clap somewhere between exasperation and wide eyed fanboyism.

For now, everything functioned fine. The world ticked on through the hollow bodies of these men as they dissolved, their bones flattening as their muscles crumpled to dust until they would become the decrepit semi-corpses tucked away in clubs Cecilia could only access twice a year on very special invitation. Money moved like water through this room, coursing like a flooding embodiment of the powers that be, the blood pumping in the veins of the grand clockwork corpus they all made up a piece of. Of all the things they discussed, materiality was never one of them, to the dismay of the help. He listened in, looking for codewords via some schizophrenic hermeneutics he hoped would lead to a final end of enlightenment, to find the true name of the demon that had diverted his society from the proper way. He found none and went home disappointed, seething over their casual joking and disregard for sense or morals. Cecilia would go home at night as well, sleeping off the drunkenness from lurking in a back corner and sipping porto all night, dancing small greetings upon her like-minded familial allies. They would all wake up and the world would continue on as it had at the party. The trucks still ran, the oil still flowed, the shelves still had food, the electricity still hummed. With a profound sense of easiness, with a profound disquiet at how shocking easy it is to maintain it all, as if there were no intelligences required to even occupy their coveted chairs, they all go back to work, back to letting the market flow through them, eroding them down until their bodies became the canyons carved through skyscraper passages, until their bones were crushed into brick to build the societies and manors of the next generation of anonymous, hollow men, just like them.