Being an account of the early years of one Jesse Truant, dream-ravaged vizard and houngan to the new gods of the city.

Jesse Truant was born with a caul wrapped around his eyes to a decaying mansion in Louisiana. That isn't his real name. His mother, at the time of his birth, was in a locked ward for dementia. No one ever spoke of his father to him. The house was gigantic, room after room of rotting, waterlogged books and wallpaper lazily forming arabesques on the wall. Skeletal great aunts lorded over dinners each evening, and an array of silent, ancient servants trailed after the boy. He later suspected the servants might have already been dead.

He did, however, have a puppy.

A pale and anemic boy heir to a decaying fortune, and to a family history with more than just skeletons, he was frequently absent from school. Brain fever, the notes to the principal said. The town left him alone. They heard about his birth, and their mothers told them quietly to stay out of the boy's way. The county, however, took a dimmer view of things. Jesse was constantly in fights, when he wasn't rocking autistically in his seat, or refusing to touch a book that hadn't already been read.

When he was twelve, the county Sheriff drove him home from school and stood on the wet planks of the veranda, chewing Jesse's great aunt Hyacinth out for negligence. Six minutes after the Sheriff’s speech was over, he was peeling out in terror, never to return. Jesse was officially home schooled from that day on.

Jesse had always heard voices. He figured it was just the house. And his dreams, well... everyone dreams of the same place, night after night, don't they? Jesse dreamt of the castle, on the hill, with the oceans around it. And the door with the puzzle that locked it. So, at age twelve and a half, Jesse solved the puzzle. Inside the door was a polished marble atrium with an ivory fountain and a winged cat. The cat's name was Ezekiel.

As Jesse explored the castle in his dreams, Ezekiel taught him how to shape them. There were visitors - spirits and gods, forgotten and unborn, who came to socialize, to politick, or to snoop. Nobody told him whose castle it was. Early training for a lifetime of gate crashing. At dinner, Aunt Hyacinth would nonchalantly ask, "What's the Marquis wearing this season?" or, "Do tell Mr. Carrefour I say hello, won't you, dear?" Jesse thought this was normal. He hadn't left the estate in two years. The days he roamed the woods with his dog, or sat indoors and tried to pry waterlogged pages apart. He often failed. He was eighteen before he found out that Doc Eon escaped from the Hollow Earth and the clutches of its hexapod denizens.

At sixteen, his Aunt informed him that he was going to inherit the family ring. Matter of factly. Between soup and crab legs. "Be a dear and wear a suit saturday." Ezekiel told him to be careful. Ezekiel had never liked his Aunt, but Jesse just assumed it had nothing to do with him. Nothing else ever seemed to. So, Friday night, Jesse learned how to tie a tie. Difficult to learn from someone without opposable thumbs, I might add. And Saturday morning, he put a suit on. That night they killed him.

Hyacinth etched his secret name on a bullet, Muriel stood him in front of the coffin - he hadn't figured out what was coming next - and Laetitia shot him between the eyes. He woke up in a coffin. Ezekiel was sitting on his chest. He could feel the bullet under his skin, lodged against his skull. "They're going to feed you to the gods," the cat says. "It's why they never die." Jesse had other plans.

He opened the coffin and sat up in the antechamber of the dream castle. Someone handed him a drink. He stepped out of the coffin and picked his way through the weird polygonal twister game going on, and followed Ezekiel out the front door. It took a month to find Legba, get an audience, and work a bargain. Jesse traded his name for the name of the locks binding his wrists in the other world. Bum deal, but sixteen year olds don't haggle well under pressure. Ezekiel said he could have gotten the same thing for the name of his dog, but Ezekiel always found something to bitch about.

He woke up in a coffin, again. He whispered the name of the lock, and felt the tumblers twist and click. He sat up. He was in the basement. They'd killed his dog. Memories are a bit fuzzy, from here on out. Jesse has made lots of deals and sold a lot of his memories. He doesn't know where most of his tattoos are from. He doesn't think he always had this face on. He remembers watching the fire eat his house, remembers his Aunts screaming, and remembers the flashing sirens, and how long it took them to navigate the flooding driveway.

They locked him up. Lockdown, psychward, restraints - the whole nine yards. Nobody mentioned that the bodies were decomposed before the fire started. Maybe nobody noticed. Jesse was shipped to a Knoxville facility, pumped full of drugs and rolled over twice a day to prevent bedsores. The Halidol made everything cloudy and made it easy for the boy to sleep sixteen to twenty two hours a day. He spent a lot of time with Ezekiel that year. As Jesse tells it, the way he escaped was:

" I was dating a sylph named Hazel. She lived inside a shade of blue. She came to a party to celebrate Viscomte Jandelbraas being promoted from a euclidian to a non-euclidian manifestation. He'd been a torus. Now he was something weirder - anyway, as ranks were measured, it was a step up and I'd helped him with some gossip and intrigue, and she was at his party.
Then she started cheating on me with some Reichsbaron from the outer realms. I was moody and pissy and too depressed to deal with sleep so I woke up, despite the drugs. Jandelbraas still owed me one, so he helped get me outside my room, or maybe just convinced or explained to me that I already was outside, and I stole the custodian's clothes from his locker and walked off the grounds and hitchhiked to Philly. Took me three hours to realize that I’d left my name inside. Never did see fit to go back after it."

When his locked room was found empty, and his locked restraints untouched, Jesse's file was quietly lost. In Philadelphia Jesse met Skinny Pete, a semi-notorious grifter, and was put to work. Apprenticed to Pete, Jesse would 'rope' targets in, finding new victims for Pete's con games and guiding them back to Pete for fleecing. Jesse took a ten percent cut, but he learned the art of the con.

He knew he was crazy. The voices were too loud. He kept seeing the future out of the corner of his eye. Ezekiel was in his dreams. Dead movie stars spoke to him at two in the morning, sometimes from movies they weren't even in. Everything around him turns into a portent when he looks.

So he drinks a lot. He doesn't dream when he passes out. But, being a short-con specialist, being drunk doesn't help. He ends up in Carson City Jail at nineteen for running the gold brick against an undercover narcotics officer in Reno.

Voodoo Eddie was a Brazilian gambler in for a three to five on a grand theft auto. He was also an Akashic who knew Capoeria. Chance, fate, or something Jesse never figured out put them in the same cell. Eddie saw Jesse convulse as his cigarette ash fell and spelled out the name of a mob enforcer who Jesse didn't know was set up to be shivved that night.

Eddie started talking. He laid out the game, told Jesse to quit drinking and listen to Ezekiel. He even believed Jesse's dreams and called them his desmesne. Once Jesse sobered up enough, Eddie started teaching him the basic rhythms of Capoeira, which coincidentally doubled as the rhythms for the daily Candomble rituals.

Jesse was a Con Man when he met Eddie. Capoeria was as natural to him as could be. A quick study in deception, Jesse quickly took to the acrobatics of this new, physical grift. Cons are a game, Magic is a grift, and Capoeira is a jogo. It all fit. At the same time, Eddie was shaping Jesse's understanding of his dreams, and teaching him to listen to that same voice even when he was awake. After two years of this, Ezekiel took Jesse into the castle and showed him new rooms. Jesse learned the names of new spirits, ones that could do things. Eddie called it a seeking. The next day, Jesse walked.

A greyhound bus to California later (and sixty three short-conned dollars richer), Jesse met Ezekiel's partner, Johnny Irish. Johnny was an on-again, off-again member of the local Hermetic Chapter. An Irish mobster from House Fortunae, Johnny's sigil was under censure as often as not. He convinced Jesse to start studying to earn a sigil. Jesse started working at the Crossed Rose, which was owned by his Magister Donatien ex Bonisangus. Being the new kid, sullen and angry, he wasn't very popular. He wasn't willing to commit to the hermetic paradigm, couldn't shake what Eddie had taught him, or what experience had taught him before that.

"I was working in a bookstore right after I got recruited for the Order. Not really interesting. I didn't fit in, I thought they were full of shit, they suspended me for selling another student's foci for beer money. One time, though, I tried to make the gods come and meet the other students. I was trying to impress a girl. When I came to, all the color had bled out of the world. Magister Donatien said it was a scourge visited on me for my arrogance. He wanted me to write a paper about what I'd do differently. What I'd learned. It took me two months to realize that nobody else walked around seeing the world rot in front of their eyes. I thought it was like a TV, and someone had just changed the channel. Anyway. I didn't write the paper. Even with the scourge, and everything withering as I looked - if I ate enough acid, the rotting looked like melting and the colors came back better than before. So I failed my Paradox class.

I did meet this kid Pete Alghieri, though, and Pete was sort of a badass. Showed me how to fix a walkman to make the static play the music of the spheres. And taught me the horoscope game. Pick a horoscope at random. Tune the walkman to the station that that planet broadcasts (Sucks to draw neptune - AM stations don't have any treble reception in the cities) and read the horoscope. That way, you retune your brain for the week until you play the game again. Yeah. Donatien hated that, too."

Jesse committed himself to his reading and studying. He quit his bookstore job. For rent, he parlayed a bartending job into a deejaying gig under the name Kid Sinister. He tried to join house Ex Misc, figuring that he was basically a convert from the Akashics (Though he's never heard that word applied to him), and that Ex Miscellanea had historically welcomed converts.

"I basically quit because they're wrong. They believe in commanding spirits. I think, well, look: if some guy down the block is a badass and fucking with you, you don't do pushups until you scare him. You just find a bigger badass, find out what he wants, and make a deal. I knew I didn't have the juice to call anything heavy. But the other kids didn't. So, in Certamen, I made like I was gonna call a hippogriff. Classic Malandragem. Capoeria allows for dirty tricks. Certamen, apparently, doesn't. Still - nowhere in the rules of that bullshit little pokemon game does it say which spirits we're allowed to call for dueling. Is it my fault I had a better phonebook than those other gimps?

Algie got me to stick around, though, and when this son & lumiere freak named Hiro showed up, shit started getting weird. We all sort of stopped talking to the elders, because they were all hostile to each other, and bitching about the storm, and talking about war this and ascension that. I, on the other hand, knew a drumbeat that could summon the loas to the dancefloor. I don't remember who it was that thought of putting a rave in an Orgone box. If it was me, I must have had a different planet that week. Hiro says it was the pigs, but I never listen to them. Right after they showed up, though, we made a big Orgone collector, consecrated it to resonate at the frequency of Venus, and built it inside a warehouse. Once the beat kicked in, and I added some ultrabass NLP, pidgin enochian dialects that took the pain of dancing away, people started getting really into it. Hiro and Algie were dead on and before you knew it, the gods were on the dancefloor.

Algie dissapeared. I think it was a girl. Or a guy. Maybe money, too. Right after that, I figured out that the loas lived inside a television. Lucy started hitting on me, but I think she knew my ex so I never let on I noticed. But when I told Hiro, he grokked to it quick. Next rave, he was projecting dead rock stars on the walls. And once the drugs kicked in - was this the hippy's doing, or did he show up later? - once the drugs kicked in, no-one noticed that the projections were dancing, too.

Magpie wore Peter Lorre one night when I'd just gotten this great batch of ahayuasca roach carapaces off the local aborigines. So I hit a vein and was on the couch when Lorre starts pitching scams. Next thing I remember, I've got a tattoo all over my back, I don't have a shadow, and I can't speak Spanish anymore. But now the gods can wear me, and now I'm swapping favors left and right, brokering deals and I've got a new girlfriend and she's a selkie and things are great. But Hiro claims we have to split because the cops are coming again - I have to pack my records. Hiro is breaking down his computers and the kid's tearing the televisions apart. We never move the pigs. I try not to think about how they always get to the basement before us."

San Francisco started to feel crowded. The executive-track Thiggians became less cold and more openly hostile. Jesse and Hiro became roomates. They called the roach-infested hovel they rented the invisible college.

House Thig wished it were invisible.

The decision to move came suddenly, and might not even have been spoken of. One night, they passed out individually as usual, amidst whatever they were doing. The next morning, they woke up and it was unanimous.

They started packing.

Paradigm

The spirits are everywhere and everything. They don't have faces, that's just how we interact with them. The world is a five dimensional crystal vibrating in an eight dimensional fluid. When thoughts intersect our three dimensional lattice, from outside the confines of spacetime, this is how they appear. We used to call them Angels. Then loas. They include all sorts of things - a spirit is the life of an idea, a word given form.

Now, they take the faces of celebrities and comic book characters. Fictional heros and dead rock stars. Elementals, ghosts, and gods. They speak in the static of television, wave from the reflection of neon light.

Watch a newspaper fold itself in the wind and it will spell out your horoscope. If you use tarot cards right, the scenes they show animate themselves and become mirrors, set at odd angles, that reflect around the corners of time.

There is an economy of barter. After initial contact, Jesse performs favors for the spirits, stockpiling goodwill. Then he can call on them and they are obligated to return the favor. He engages in weird ritualistic behavior (Like voodoo - drink rum and curse and smoke cheap cigars and eat candy, and you get Papa Ghede's favors) to garner favor from them, and then he spends these favors as needed. Speed Racer can teach you, for a night, to drive like a maniac. Borges' librarian will read to you from all the books never written. Batman will teach you to hide in the shadows and dissapear.

Everyone knows about these spirits, everyone feels them - Jesse just knows how to talk to them. If you speak their language, everyone will hear you. Neurolinguistic Programming is what you call speaking in the imperative tense of enochian. In the linguistic field that is your mind, you can construct golems - automata - dreamthings - that are every bit as autonomous as a computer's subroutines. These are cyclical prayers, zen koans, or artificial intelligences.

Between Eddie and Johnny, Jesse learned a strange homebrew paradigm. The common ground was linguistics. Jesse's paradigm involves naming. And the precise motions that Eddie taught him are what Jesse considers a language. Do is a means by which a Mage can write in space, with his body as a stylus. A form is a word, a name, a rune. A kata is a phrase, a sigil, an incantation. To get what you want is a question of deception and subterfuge, no matter what the language or what the medium. Jesse sees no contradiction here.

Foci

Notes

1. Capoeira:

"In Portuguese, the language of Brazil, Capoeira is referred to as a jogo, or a game.
Capoeira is characterized by deceptive kicks, sweeps, trip-em-ups, head butts, elbows and knees. Two players enter a circle of onlookers and participants, known as a roda. At the head of the roda are musicians, fellow Capoeira players, who play instruments specific to the art. There is the berimbau, an primitive bowed instrument, played bya Mestre, or master of the art, whose tempo dictates to the players what game they will play in the roda. The berimbau is accompanied by the atabaque, a floor drum, and a pandeiro, a Brazilian tambourine. The Mestre also leads the onlookers and fellow players in songs that reflect the type of games being played within the roda.
Fast tempos dictate games where the players throw fast, powerful kicks and blows at each other, along with movements reminiscent of the most acrobatic gymnastics. Slower tempos dictate more dance like interaction, and more deception between the two players. Lyrics to songs reflect the action. For example, if one player is obviously losing his cool, the Mestre might sing a traditional song about a bawling child who is crying. The lyrics serve to remind the upset player that he is losing his cool, and hence emotional balance, a key to good Capoeira play.
On it's deepest level, Capoeira transcends martial arts, music and ritual and is a philosophical framework for approaching and interacting with the others and the world at large. It is a deep and holistic art form that pushes the practitioner to the proverbial limits - physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually."

(http://www.capoeira.com/planetcapoeira/popup/whatis.htm) Some basics are here: http://www.wu-wien.ac.at/usr/h96b/h9650297/cap-basics.html

2. Candomble:

"Derived from the Yoruba people of West Africa, Candomblé seeks harmony with nature. The religion is organized around religious centres known as terreiros, which are usually led by high priestesses, mães de santo (mother of saints) or priests, pais de santo (father of saints).  Followers worship a pantheon of orixás in an annual cycle, like the liturgical cycle of the Catholic Church . . . In the religious ceremonies, practitioners dress in the colours of the orixás and place food at the altar before singing special songs and dancing precisely choreographed steps to the sacred drums. The anthropomorphic nature of the orixá allows an intimate contact between believer and deity, and the highlight of the Candomblé ceremony is the epiphany, or possession, when the orixá takes over the believer's body."(http://www.ama.africatoday.com/candomble.htm)