It was early in the spring of 1864 that Aleister Crowley put up his feet in the leatheriest of the leather chairs in my drawing room, still weighted heavily with the tools of his trade: a motley collection of ropes, hooks, ice picks, hand axes, regular axes, lanterns, pots, pans, and several of the beards one only obtains in the Wild Lands. I think he had been somewhere in the Indies, but I'd forgotten to ask. He was gaunt beneath his curly, sun-kissed hair and his skin appeared to be a single human-shaped callus.
"How do you feel?" I said. The spring rain - still frozen - beat softly on my roof and leaked in through the casements.
He puffed up and then exhaled. "At peace. You should go, Jack. Before you get too old."
"Sure. But what about the apothecary?"
He laughed. "Well, you'd have to close it of course. Life calls, you know?"
"Yes yes."
"Surely you want something more than this." He waved at the room in an effeminate, dismissive way.
"I expect I do."
"What is it you want, Jack? If you didn't have the apothecary."
"Honestly?"
"It's me."
"I'd kind of like to live forever."
He cackled. "Most wouldn't say it's a calling, but I'll give it to you." He filled his pipe with a skunky weed I'd never seen before and lit up. "Well, no time like the present to start working that out. You still have your health and most of your wits left. Not a bad vessel in which to set sail for eternity."
"I suppose I do have a few wits left to expend." He passed me the pipe.
It wasn't long before the bookshelves began to melt. Aleister launched into a lengthy recounting of his mountaineering escapades, of which I remember little. There were frozen limbs, natives amorous and vengeful by turns [Aleister has always inspired either love or hatred in most of his interactions with other people. I was perhaps an exception to this rule, as I enjoyed his company but my armor of social indifference kept us from butting heads.], betrayals, lost comrades, and anything else that might fit neatly in the pages of a romance. I listened with characteristic skepticism, yet knew that it was all true anyway.
I admit to a sense of the smallness of my own life, trapped in my apartments with only the detritus of my studies and trade. Much as I preferred things this way, I told Al how I wished to expand into the universe, physically if possible. He was quite positive, of course. "What you want is transcendence, right? It comes in many forms, each with many avenues of pursuit."
I knew well what he was trying to say, and I began to map them in my head. Circuits of passage were forming, transits around an across a great sea. I filed away certain items of my own collection to refer to later that very night.
