This is the sixth installment of my series writing one short story a week. If you enjoy it, take a look at the other installments in the series, and remember to like and subscribe!
I lived with my brother in Toluca Lake a few years ago, during which time he constructed these smallish pyramids in imitation of Giza. They were very important to him. On weeknights, Carter would stay up late researching the materials, orientation, and construction methods used to create the original pyramids, then spend his weekends laying out the foundation in the backyard or hauling limestone to a stonecutter for it to be shaped to his specifications. It was a project that took several months because a) he didn’t know what he was doing and b) he dithered at every step of the way, never quite sure if he was doing it the way it ought to be done or if he could do it slightly more optimally. Just marking out the positions of the pyramids took weeks. Literally weeks. He was out there with a compass, adjusting the markers that were meant to be the corners by millimeters this way and that, trying to make sure they aligned perfectly with the cardinal directions. He would settle on something one day and then, the next, he’d be out there on his hands and knees adjusting it ever so slightly again. And then there was the whole star shaft dilemma, where he had to plan out how to make three slanting shafts within the pyramids that, at a certain time of year, would point directly at the three stars in Orion’s belt.
One night, when we were drinking beers on the back porch, I asked him if he planned on building some sort of room under the pyramids where he could observe the three stars during that special time of the year. He said no, he was not going to do that, because the purpose of the star shafts was not to allow mortal eyes to view these celestial bodies. Rather, they were to serve as gateways for the stars to channel their energy from heaven down to earth.
“What does that even mean?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I’m not supposed to know what it means. I just know what I’m supposed to do.”
He was one of those people who didn’t trust western logic. He thought that the basic tenets of civilization were a mistake. We ought not to shape the world to make it more comfortable for us. Rather, we should spiritually shape ourselves so that we were at peace with the natural uncertainty of life. If we did that, he said, we would be able to harness some sort of magical energy. These were only just thoughts for him, though. He still had a comfortable life with his 9-5 job and vaccines and food delivery apps. His ideas were just a vague moral stand he could take to make himself feel superior to others. And he definitely wasn’t someone who was at peace with uncertainty, or even someone who really believed in magic at the end of the day.
The case of the vanishing painter was a perfect example, which I’ll explain.
We were hosting a lot of house shows back then. Our place had a big great room and a backyard that made it a pretty decent (and cheap) venue. Carter had this friend, Horatio, who was deep into this weird, new-agey music scene. We let him put on a show one time with his Peruvian flute band and it ended up being a hit. We had anticipated twenty or thirty people to show up but there ended up being well over a hundred. And these flutes got the people going crazy. I’ve never seen people dance the way these people were dancing. It was primal. Anyway, there were a lot of people in the crowd who had bands of their own and all of them instantly wanted to perform at our house as well. Everyone agreed that there was just something different about the atmosphere at our place. There was something going on here and everyone wanted a piece of it. So it became a pretty regular thing for us to host these things. The acts were quite wide-ranging in style but all of them were unorthodox. There was an asian guy with dreadlocks who played an analog synth set that was supposed to sonically represent an ayahuasca trip. Another time a massive, 40-something Mongolian dude came and performed a three hour long throat singing session, accompanied by an instrument whose name escapes me. As you can imagine, this music drew a wide variety of interesting characters. It was not really my scene but I’ve always been good at talking with people and had a good time meeting these unusual folks.
One time I started hitting it off with this painter. He was dressed in a button down, sport coat, slacks, a long peacoat, and a fedora to top it all off. He was a very cheery person and I enjoyed learning about his passion for landscapes and plein air painting. He had this peculiar phrase he kept repeating— “And it’s just as simple as that!”— which he always accompanied with a bright smile. When he asked me about my life and I told him that I was taking things easy, working at a grocery store, and sleeping in as much as possible, he said, “And it’s just as simple as that, isn’t it? That’s what you like to do and it’s just that simple.”
“Yes,” I said. “See, you understand. It’s just a simple life.”
“As it should be!”
It was nice to meet someone who had such a cheerful energy and who just enjoyed life and did not bore me with a bunch of angry opinions about society, as a lot of other people in the scene did. As we continued to talk, we came upon the idea to take a stroll around the neighborhood. He had found it charming when he drove up to our house and I offered to take him on a little tour. We stepped out of the party and walked around the sycamore-lined streets a little, which were flooded with puddles here and there from the recent rains. As we walked, a thin drizzle started up, but it was not enough for us to end our walk. Eventually we came upon my favorite house of the neighborhood, a squat brick bungalow with a yard overrun by vegetation. In front of the house was a large puddle, glimmering with the light of the street lamp as the rain rippled through it. We stopped and admired the simple beauty of it.
Suddenly, the painter turned to me and said, “Well, my friend, I have half a mind to walk right into that puddle and disappear into another dimension!”
I laughed and said, “That sounds nice.”
“Yes, it would be nice, wouldn’t it? And it’s just as simple as that.”
He then proceeded to walk right into the puddle, and it must have been much deeper than I had thought, for he descended quickly down to his waist and the next moment the tip of his fedora disappeared under the puddle’s glimmering surface.
Astounded, I waited a moment for him to rise and start laughing at the joke he’d played on me. But it quickly became apparent that he was not going to emerge. I rolled up my sleeve to test the water at what should have been it’s deepest point, where his hat had disappeared. But when I dipped my hand into the cold water, I quickly touched the hard pavement underneath. It was not a deep puddle. And yet the painter was gone.
I returned to the house, still reeling from the impossible thing I had just witnessed, and pulled Carter aside. We went to his room and I closed the door to muffle the noise of the tribal music coming from the living room. I sat on his bed and explained what I had seen, how the painter had just walked right into the puddle and disappeared. He looked at me skeptically.
“I don’t know, man,” he said. “That doesn’t sound possible to me.”
“Of course it doesn’t sound possible. But I saw it. I really did.”
“It must have been some sort of trick. What you’re describing is some sort of magical inter-dimensional shit that doesn’t exist.”
“You really don’t believe me, do you?”
“I believe you’re being honest but I also believe you’ve been tricked.”
“And how would you respond if I was this skeptical about your whole pyramid project, all your ideas about harvesting the ‘energy of the stars.’”
His face changed. “Be careful there. That’s a very special thing for me.”
“I know it’s special and I think I’ve been quite supportive of it. But you’re trying to do is basically magic, right? And if that’s the case, why can’t you believe what I’ve seen?”
He took a deep breath in and assumed a condescending posture. “No one at this party is actually capable of this… ‘magic,’ or whatever you want to call it. They’re all about posturing. This trick the painter pulled on you is just the type of thing I would expect from them.”
“What makes your pyramid thing any different from what this painter did?”
He knitted his brows to make his point. “Because I’m doing something that’s actually been done before. It’s science. I don’t want to keep talking about this.”
He left the room and went back to the music.
He always held himself apart from the other people in the scene. After the first few shows, he didn’t really want to do them anymore. Horatio started to dog him to get him to agree to it, hyping up the act he had in mind to try (in vain) to get Carter excited about it. “This girl is a nyckelharpa master,” he told us one time as we were drinking coffee in the living room. “There’s probably less than a hundred masters in the world. You’re never going to see someone play it the way she plays it.” Carter frowned, unconvinced, until Horatio finally offered for us to charge $10 at the door instead of $5. It wouldn’t matter anyway. The people in this scene would shill out whatever we asked for to see our shows.
One thing that frustrated me the most about Carter at the time was that he went to great lengths to conceal the pyramids from the guests. He installed a chicken wire fence around the area, hung up signs that said “Authorized Personnel Only,” and threw a tarp over them. I tried to explain to them that, of all the people in the world, these people were probably the ones who would be the most interested in his pyramid project. They might even have some helpful knowledge of the ancient Egyptians that they could share with him. He insisted that no, the pyramids were not something he would share. The people would get their own ideas about how he should best construct them and their ideas would muddle his thinking and ruin the whole thing.
That did not stop them from being curious about the chickenwire enclosure. This one girl, Dahlia, was particularly curious. Like us, she was in her late 20s, but unlike us, she was captivatingly beautiful. She had been at a few of our shows before and always stood out as she danced in the living room to whatever global rhythm was on that night. She had long, dark hair and mysterious green eyes that looked at you from below her broad eyebrows.
One time she took a break from dancing to smoke in the backyard. I saw her wander over to the chickenwire fence and, with a glance over her shoulder, try to make an opening in it to see what was behind. Then I saw Carter going over to stop her and I knew I should go over to mediate.
“That’s off limits,” I caught him saying as I approached.
“Oh I’m not gonna cause any trouble, I can promise you that.”
“Well promise or no promise it’s still off limits.”
“Can you at least tell me what it is?”
“No.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. I was a little drunk. “Carter here is a bit of an archeologist.”
“An archeologist? Please, tell me more.”
“Go on Carter,” I said. “Tell her.”
He looked at me the way Caesar must have looked at Brutus. I had betrayed him, of course, but I didn’t care at the moment.
“He’s shy,” I said. “But he’s really got a lot of interesting ideas. Tell her about your project.”
She grinned at him expectantly and I was praying to God he would just relax for one moment and let me wingman him. But he just told me “Don’t,” and walked away, leaving Dahlia and I alone.
I apologized for him and gave some explanation about his character. Then there was a bit of an awkward pause where I didn’t know what to say, so I just pointed to her red solo cup and said “What’re you drinking?”
“Water. Do you want some?”
“I guess I probably should.”
She handed me the cup and I looked at the water inside it before taking a sip. But when I did, it was not water I tasted, but wine.
“This isn’t water. This is wine.”
She just smiled at me.
She and I ended up hooking up that night and it turned out she had a whole wealth of magical powers that I do not even feel comfortable sharing at the moment. But, being a good brother, I did not reveal to her his secret, and I rejected her persistent attempts to see what was behind the chickenwire fence.
After she left the next morning, Carter and I were drinking coffee in the trashed living room. He did not believe me when I insisted that I had revealed nothing to her. It could have been that he was just jealous and I wanted to be sensitive to that. Still, he was being quite an accusatory dick about it.
“Carter, you can believe me. It’s as simple as that.”
“There’s all sorts of things you’ll say to a girl you’re sleeping with.”
“That may be a fair accusation, I admit, but I said nothing. Aren’t you at all curious about what it was like? Because I’ll tell you, that was one interesting woman.”
His curiosity won over him. “Interesting how?”
“Well you might not believe me about this part but… this woman is magic. Literally magic. It’s just like the painter.”
“I don’t want to hear this.”
“Let me just tell you. Can I tell you?”
He sighed “Okay.”
And I told him. This time he at least seemed entertained by what I told him. I even got him laughing. But when my story was over and we were each shaking our heads with residual giggles, I asked him, “So do you believe me? Like, do you actually believe what I just said.”
His smile disappeared and he took a deep breath. “I would love to say yes, but no. I don’t believe you.”
He left to fill his cup with coffee.
Dahlia was not the last of the magical beings. As we continued to host these shows, I continued to encounter people who would show me their impossible abilities. In each case, it proved difficult to prove these things to Carter, who was not open to believing anything at all.
One time, I was chatting with several people in the living room after the show had ended. They were talking about restaurants in the valley. There was one voice I couldn’t quite place on any of the four people talking. It was a man’s voice, rather deep, and it didn’t match with the voice of the only man I could see in the small group. Searching for its source on my right, I spotted something moving on the bookshelf. That’s when I found him: a tiny, portly man no more than five inches tall, standing right there on the shelf. His arms were crossed, resting on his belly. In one hand he held a red solo cup and with the other he stroked his beard as he listened to the person speaking. I fixed my eyes on him, trying to reconcile what I was seeing with reality, until he caught me staring and was taken aback. I realized I was being rude, staring at him like that, and looked away. Then I realized I should go get Carter to show him this incontrovertible proof of something supernatural. But when I finally brought him to the shelf to show him, the tiny man had disappeared. Carter was quite upset with me for wasting his time.
Another time, during the week leading up to the show, there was a man who appeared in every one of my dreams. At the show, he showed up in the flesh, a young turkish dude with a shaved head and a beard. He did not do anything menacing. Like the tiny man, he caught me staring at him, and all he did was give me a knowing smile and wink before returning his attention to the performance.
Another time, I was just watching the performance of that night. It was a traditional Punjabi folk act, with a young man playing the sarangi, a droning, whining string instrument. It was dark and I found myself quite entranced by the music. Then, suddenly, someone tapped my shoulder, and I was instantly transported to a forest of thin trees. I could still hear the sarangi but there was nobody around me. I was totally alone. A moment later, someone tapped my shoulder again, and I was back in the room. Whoever it was who tapped my shoulder, I never saw.
Every morning after a show, Carter and I would drink coffee as we nursed out hangovers and chatted about the night, and every time I had some new story to relay that fell on deaf ears. One time, when we were chatting in the kitchen, I asked him “How is it you haven’t seen any of the things I’m talking about?”
“Because they didn’t happen.”
“Do you even talk to these people?”
“Not really.”
“Maybe that’s why. You’re always sticking close to me or Horatio. You never have the opportunities to see these things.”
“Or they just didn’t happen.”
“But they did happen, Carter. They did.”
“Okay, I wanna settle on an agreement here. I’m already not too keen on hosting these things in the first place. And it makes it a whole lot worse when every morning you come to me with these insane stories and then, somehow, you make it my fault that I didn’t see these things because I’m not ‘social’ enough or whatever. So I want an agreement. We can keep hosting these things, fine, but please, please don’t tell me any more about these insane things you’ve supposedly witnessed.”
I saw that he was serious. And although this was exactly the type of behavior that infinitely frustrated me about him our entire lives, I knew it was not an argument I could continue. He was my brother and there are some infinitely frustrating things about brothers that you just have to let be because you’re never going to change them.
I took it up with Horatio instead. He had always been more of Carter’s friend than mine and somehow I hadn’t had much of a chance to speak with him about these things. I left the house so that Carter couldn’t hear me, got some breakfast at a local diner, and gave Horatio a call when I was finished eating.
“What’s up?” He said. “Another great show last night, huh?”
“Yeah, it was great man. I loved it.”
“I hope the place isn’t too trashed.”
“No it’s not too trashed. I actually like cleaning.”
“Cool yeah. Well, that’s good.”
There was a brief silence on the line.
“Listen, Horatio, I got a question for you.”
“Of course.”
“These people you invite to these things… you ever notice anything strange about them?”
There was another silence on the line, this one more pregnant.
“You’ve started seeing some things, huh?” He said.
“Things, yeah. I mean… unbelievable things.”
He laughed. “Yeah, no… I know what you’re talking about. You’re definitely onto something.”
“What does that mean? What am I onto?”
“Let’s just say… we’ve got something going on here. I wish I could you what it is, but that would kinda ruin the whole thing. But there’s nothing you need to worry about.”
“Okay…”
“I don’t mean to sound menacing, of course. But you truly don’t have anything to worry about. By the way, my friends really like you. A lot of them have told me they enjoy talking to you.”
“Oh, that’s good to hear.”
“I gotta go man but hey, we’ll keep in touch. I think I found an opera singer that wants to perform sometime.”
“Wow, opera, okay. Well, we’ll talk soon.”
We hung up then. As much as Horatio insisted I had nothing to worry about, I couldn’t help but feel a bit suspicious. What was this “something” he and his friends had going on? What was the purpose of these shows at our house? Why was it that everyone agreed that there was something different about the atmosphere at our place?
Then I started thinking about the timing of all of this. The first time Horatio approached us with a show was the same week that Carter had announced his intention to construct these pyramids. When Carter had finally aligned the corners to match the cardinal directions as precisely as possible, that was when I met the vanishing painter. As he had continued to lay blocks carefully, layer by layer, these unusual occurrences became more and more frequent. Whatever Carter was doing with these pyramids, it was drawing more and more of these crazy cats that had my head spinning every Saturday night.
The connection was clear to me and I only had to bring it up with Carter. The problem was Carter had absolutely no interest in hearing anything more about these people I had been meeting. And to be honest, to give credence to his belief in these pyramids seemed like a defeat for me. Here he had been, so obstinately refusing to believe anything I said, all the while pursuing his own batshit crazy project, and now I was supposed to be the one to turn to him and say, “I’m sorry man, but you were right about the whole pyramid thing.” If the roles were reversed, he never would have apologized to me. That I knew for certain.
Around the same time, he was nearing completion with the project, star shafts assembled and all. I saw that the pyramids had risen to a respectable height and asked him when it would be finished. He eyed me suspiciously but told me Friday. This was just in time for Orion’s belt to reach its highest point that Saturday, when Horatio had conveniently scheduled another show, and when the three stars would align perfectly with the star shafts.
Friday night came and I noticed Carter sneak out to the backyard to finish the project. He did not invite me to join him but I knew that this was actually a special moment for him. Despite my frustration, I wanted to see the completion, so I spied on him from a window as he carefully placed the capstones on each of the three pyramids. Then he just stood there, hands on his hips, seeming proud of his achievement but also seeming like he was expecting something more. I went out to him.
“You did it!” I said with open arms.
He hesitantly accepted my hug. “Yeah, I did.”
“How does it feel?”
“It feels… good. I guess we’re going to see what happens tomorrow.”
“Are you finally gonna let people see them, now that they’re finished.”
“Oh no. I’m gonna block out the windows. The entire backyard is going to be off limits.”
“… You didn’t think to mention this to me or Horatio beforehand?”
“Well, it doesn’t matter whether I did or not because the backyard is going to be off limits.”
I wanted to grab his neck and scream at him to please, please, stop being so goddam weird about these things and just let people see them. But I remembered this was his special moment and thought otherwise.
“Carter, man, listen. I know we’ve had our disagreements lately and I know I’ve questioned this whole pyramid project but… I just have to tell you an idea I have.”
I explained to him my theory connecting the pyramids to what I had been witnessing as well as what Horatio had told me. He was taken aback as soon as I mentioned anything about the people I had supposedly met. But then, as he listened, he grew thoughtful, and I knew I had won him over by validating his own pyramid theory. When I was through with it I asked him what he thought.
“I knew it would come like this.”
“What does that mean?”
“I knew these things would do something but I knew that whatever it was it would be something I had never considered before.”
“Well you could have considered it! You very well could have considered it if you had just listened to me!”
“Hey, I think it’s a better policy if I err on the side of not believing you.”
“You’re a son of a bitch. And I guess that makes me a son of bitch.”
We hugged briefly again and headed back inside.
“Whatever’s going to happen,” I said as we got close to the backdoor. “You don’t think it’ll be dangerous, right?”
“Oh no,” he said, opening the door. “Or… well… I guess we’re going to see.”
We both laughed and went inside.
The next day came. As usual, Horatio stopped by in the early afternoon to help us set up. As we were moving furniture to the walls in the living room, his eye caught the finished pyramids out back.
“You’re leaving them uncovered?” He asked Carter.
“Yeah,” Carter said. “Call it a grand reveal.”
Horatio looked at me. I nodded. Then he said, “This is going to be a great show.”
Night came, the people arrived, and the opera singer began setting up with help from her keyboard player. She was a stout woman who must have been in her forties, dressed in an elaborate, gilded gown with her face painted grotesquely with makeup. Her keyboard player was a small man dressed in all black. They made an interesting pair.
I noticed Carter was quite more talkative than he had ever been. A crowd had gathered around the pyramids and he clearly took great pride in explaining his project. People paid particular attention to the small star shafts on the face of the pyramids, bringing their faces close to them and then turning their heads to the stars they aligned with. An expectant energy hung over the crowd and I found I had butterflies in my stomach. I had no idea what to expect.
Horatio began to heard the people inside for the show to begin. I closed the sliding glass doors in the backyard to keep the opera sounds from disturbing our neighbors too much. Everyone stood in the great room. The keyboard player played a note in a harpsichord mode. The opera singer sang the same note briefly. Then she and the keyboard player took their marks and got ready to begin.
She burst out into a passionate song that whipped the crowd into absolute attention. Her voice dropped and rose, crescendoing to vibrant, vibrating pitch of pure emotion. It was amazing how much power her voice held. I worried that she might damage my eardrums. At the same time, she was so captivating that I did not care at all if she did cause me hearing troubles later on, and no one else in the crowd seemed to worry either. Her song, already passionate from the outset, only grew with energy. Then her voice lowered to slow deep tones, finally coming to complete silence. The crowd watched as she lowered her head briefly before raising it again with an arm outstretched in the air. Suddenly, she burst forth with song again, twice as intense as anything she had sung before, and at the same time, all of the glass sliding doors behind her shattered to pieces.
I expected the crowd to be shocked and afraid. Instead, they began to move. They were one slow mass filtering past the singer and through the back doors to the pyramids. I noticed then that three small beams of light were shooting out of the star shafts towards their respective components in Orion’s belt. As the crowd approached them, they one by one crouched in front of the pyramids and crawled right into their surfaces as if they were not made of stone, but water. One by one they disappeared, accompanied by a small flash of light from the star shafts, perhaps signaling they were being beamed to their respective stars. Soon all were gone save for Horatio, the keyboard player, and the opera singer, who had followed the crowd outside while continuing to sing.
Horatio patted Carter and me on the shoulder. “Thank you, guys,” he said. “This is a really important thing for me. You wanna come with?”
“I think I’m alright,” I said.
“Yeah, I’m alright,” Carter said.
“Suit yourselves.” He then crawled into the largest pyramid, followed by the keyboard player and the opera singer, whose song abruptly cut short as she passed through its surface.
Carter and I were left standing alone. The beams from the star shafts slowly faded away.
“Well,” I said. “That’s that.”
“Yeah.”
“I told you these people were magic.”
“And I told you the pyramids were important.”
“Yeah yeah, alright. Let’s go drink some beer.”
We were soon sitting with our beers on the back porch, chatting the night away and leaving the clean up for tomorrow.