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Previously: The CDC analyzes this new retrovirus, the Psi variant. It seems to give humans the ability to sense the weak electromagnetic fields created by each other's nervous systems.

○ The Great Opening: Week Three, Brooklyn

St Lenny howled to moon over Prospect Park.

A couple who'd been caressing on a bench turned.

"Oh, hello. Here." He found a fresh rose amidst the folds of his furs and tossed it to them. Mm. Something was off with their auras. "Hmm. She isn't that into you and you're pretending not to sense it. No masks, anymore, my friends, no masks," said St Lenny, tapping his skull as he passed.

"Fuck off!" said the man.

But Lenny was already on his way, skipping around an overturned trash can, prancing through oak leaves that speckled the once-tidy path. Hm, wouldn't it be nice? thought Lenny. Wouldn't it be nice to have a beaux of my own to caress this evening?

Gunshots sounded in the distance. St Lenny howled again. An older woman walking the other way clutched her purse. Between her olive cheeks and brown-trending-white hair, two metallic dragonflies dangled from her ears. Lovely, he thought, thumbing his own earring, a upside-down cross dangling from his right lobe.

Lenny tilted his head as she grew near. "Bold for a classy someone like you to be out so late, with the lockdowns, the riots, the madness generally about."

"They'll never take my evening stroll from me," the woman said in a Hispanic accent. She strode past without a glance.

"Oh, an evening stroll? Don't need money for that."

The Prince had taught Lenny how to be quick with the knife. He flicked it out and her purse was off her shoulder in no time. He tucked the woman's purse into his furs. "There you are, unburdened. Oh! Running! I'll run with you!"

Now St Lenny and his new lady were out for an evening run. She was easy to catch up to, but harder to run alongside of because she was slow, and Lenny was impatient with all these gods and demons on the mind. "What's your name?"

"Leave me alone!" She darted through some bushes. "Police!"

"They have bigger problems nowadays, you know that."

The air around Prospect Park was full of sirens, sirens that had no time anymore for Lenny, who skidded forth to block the woman's path. "I wanted to give you something," he said, reaching for the tiny sack in his pocket.

The woman froze. Lenny cupped her cheek with one hand and blew aromas of frankincense and myrrh into her nostrils. On cue, a faerie leapt from Lenny's consciousness and filled the woman's senses. Her eyes went wide and wondrous.

"Yes," said Lenny. "Yes, yes, do you see? It is a wondrous evening. A wondrous life."

She looked at Lenny, and then at herself, and then at the shadows dancing across the ground, of tree branches across streetlights. "Dios. What grace."

"Yes. Yes! Come with me, will you? They call me St Lenny. Your name?"

"Saint Lenny," she said, savoring the consonants. She savored the sight of him next. "Do they have saints in India?"

"Oh, I wouldn't know. They claim I'm aboriginal."

"Yes, you are an original."

"Ohhh! That's clever."

"What is?"

For a flash, Lenny saw his own glorious self through the woman's gaze, his curly top-bleached hair, his laughing eyes and warm brown skin. He could feel her insides thawing to the lilt of his melting chocolate voice.

"Are you hypnotizing me, young man?"

"Oh yes, absolutely."

"Where does your accent come from?"

"I made it up."

"How wondroos."

"You mean 'wondrous'."

The woman breathed in Lenny's aroma of musk, clove, and patchouli. "Yes, wondrous..." She said the word as if for the first time. Then she teared up and stared high between the branches. "After the 'flash riots' and the...and all the people doing suicide this week, I thought I would never find grace again." As if on cue there were the distant sounds of riot guns and screams. The waves of outrage hit them next, like the aftershock of an earthquake. "And back home, My grandson. My grandson, he...."

"He's here with us. Look!" As she spoke, St Lenny had found the memory in the woman's mind, and, together, he and the woman were giving it form. Her grandson. A young man with messy hair in a white tank top stood before them now, translucent in the moonlight.

"Mauricio! Oh Mauricio!" sobbed the woman.

Lenny lowered himself to her height. "Sweet grandma, I beg your name. I can feel it on the tip of my tongue. It starts with an C, doesn't it? Claudia. Carrrrr.... Carla. Caro––"

"It's Carmen...." The woman reached out past Lenny. "Mauricio, where are you going?"

The ghostly form of her grandson was walking into a clearing.

"Ah, there's a party, I suspect. I hope. I can sense it." St Lenny inhaled the night air. "Can you?"

"Yes. I believe I can." Carmen fluttered her eyelids. "Oh. Who are they? Are they friends?"

"Oh! Oh yes! Yes!" Lenny's friends had come. Of course they had. He needn't even call, these days they just knew. They emerged from the trees. Lenny felt Carmen gawk at their attire – wreaths of apples, horned crowns, tusked masks with gold ornaments, a dress made of twigs. They were accompanied by several guests like Carmen, wearing normal clothes but with giggling eyes. These guests were under the Charm.

Lenny took Carmen's hand and tuned into her attention. Oh, she was missing half the party! "Open to your faerie," he whispered. "And it will open you to the greater world."

Carmen did as he said. He watched a psychedelic aphrodite with mixed insect and feathered wings bloom between her eyebrows. The faerie sparkled forth, weaving a starry trail around the trees, which lit up with burning devils, dryads, swirling geists, Slavic gods, and other figures of myth.

Carmen's mouth went wide. "Oh my goodness!"

"Yes. Yes!" St Lenny stepped forward into the clearing. "My fellow Heathens!" he sang.

At once all beings earthly and astral howled to the full moon, Carmen too. Oh sweet Carmen. The tiny muscles in St Lenny's hand pulsed into hers. Years of practice in the esoteric arts had made it instinct. Their hearts became as one in rhythm.

Carmen turned to him, eyes agleam. "I used to be an actress you know."

"I suspected as much," said Lenny, drawing his lips close to hers. They kissed like it was the end of the world. (And judging by recent events, it very well might be.)

"Oy! Is that St Lenny?" boomed a deep voice. A tall and stocky young man came bounding toward them from across the lawn. He stopped inches from Lenny's face, his pale blue eyes, satin bowtie, and septum ring gleamed at odds with his dark skin. A hallucinatory raven perched on his shoulder. The man breathed from his pelvis.

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"Peace, Marquis, we've brought an offering." Lenny pulled Carmen's purse from his furs.

"Oh...." said Carmen. Then she shook her head to herself.

Nersi, tonight's cup-bearer, approached. She observed the purse curiously from behind her floral mask.

"Let our grudge come to rest," said Lenny to the Marquis. "It is too wondrous a night to brandish knives."

The Marquis considered this. "Indeed, it is."

Nersi extended out a freckled arm. "I'll take that, thank you." She passed the purse onto another waiting in the dark. Then she took out a flask and poured wine into cups for the three before her. "Red, for the iron," she said.

"Funny, no?" said the Marquis, swirling his chalice. "Iron was once used to repel ghosts, fey, and witches such as us." He clinked his cup against Lenny's. "Now it makes our magic strong."

Carmen, Lenny, and the Marquis drank deeply.

Nersi bowed and then went around the clearing, collecting other purses and bags that the assembled Heathens had seized that evening.

"The Prince is yet to show, but our friends..." the Marquis's teeth gleamed as he smiled, "brought some very delicious prey."

"Yes, I can feel them already as a numbness in the breast." St Lenny scrunched his nose. "Clippers."

"Yes, clippers." The Marquis's eyebrows arched sadistically.

"BOOOOOOOOOO!" yelled the crowd as an assemblage of men and women in disheveled business clothes were herded out of the trees and into the clearing by several Heathens with sticks.

"Who are they?" whispered Carmen to Lenny.

"The true heathens. Worshippers of numbers, definition, instrumentality as ontology. Those who would 'optimize' away the soul of the world. Prisoners of the Algorithm. Murderers of all things magic and fey. Tune into them," Lenny pointed. "And tell me how you feel."

Carmen closed her eyes and used her new sense. "Oh. I feel...sad. No, not sad. I feel...like a computer screen. They make the wondrousness go away."

"Behold. The ruling order of our day." St Lenny snorted. With a flash of hallucinatory red light, tiny devils came bubbling out of his stomach and waist. They crawled up to his shoulder and lit flames in his eyes as if his pupils were candlewicks. "But they will not rule for long."

"I don't like it. I would like them to go away."

"We can do better than make them go away." Lenny cupped a hand over his mouth. "Empty their pockets!"

Others around the clearing yelled for the same. "Reverse their pockets!" "Empty their wallets!" "A clipper's nothing without his money!"

"Listen," yelled one of the clippers being herded. He held up his hands in a pacifying gesture. "I think this is a case of misindentification. I'm not a, uh, 'clipper.' I'm an organizational psychologist."

"Awwghhhhhhh!" The Heathens covered their faces and lamented. "Worst of all!" "Most clipperiest thing I've ever heard!" "Oh delicious prey!" "Fuck the Algorithm!" "Fuck the Instrumentalist!" "Take the money!"

Heathens licked their lips as they dug into the pockets of the bewildered clippers. Those who resisted were frozen with temporary binding spells (these had gone from a questionably effective practice to astoundingly effective magic since Psi had entered everyone on earth).

The Heathens handed the money to Nersi, who lay it in a circle around the clippers.

St Lenny flicked open a lighter and set it aflame. "Here, Carmen. Some of that money is yours. You deserve to burn it."

Carmen was transfixed by the flame. St Lenny had to wrap her fingers around the lighter and give a little slap on the bum to send her off. But once she was off, she was off. Carmen pranced forth like a leprechaun. (In fact, at that moment, she was likely possessed by one – judged St Lenny by the hallucinatory green hat she had atop her ancient head.)

Carmen stopped in front of the circle of bills and took a few steps back, repulsed by the clippers' anesthetized auras. She looked at the flame of her lighter. Then she looked at one of the clippers: a bloused blonde woman who was rocking back and forth, counting to herself with her eyes squeezed shut.

"Ha!" the Marquis yelled from the sidelines. "Trying to block out the splendor?" The ghostly raven on his shoulder squawked mockingly.

"Good luck, little duck!" shouted St Lenny. "Once the witchery gets in, you won't want it out!"

Carmen looked up at the woman while she and some others crouched to set bills aflame. "Don't worry," she whispered to the woman. "It's only a game." Carmen turned to the Heathen on her left. The young lady stared back through eyeholes cut into two maple leaves. "It's just game, yes?" Carmen asked.

"Yes. All of it, just a game." The young woman grinned. "It's all a game!"

Now the clippers were trapped in the circle of burning bills. Those who tried to exit were met with leaping flames – imaginary, yet effective. St Lenny loved this new thing, that this Psi variant had made their magic visible to all. Even these servants of the Instrumentalist, who'd fitted themselves with industrial-strength blinders for over a century!

The clipper with the blouse squeezed her eyes shut. She had joined hands now with the organizational psychologist. Something passed between the two. Then the woman yelled, "This. Isn't. Happening!" The other clippers, to their own surprise, found their mouths chanting these final two words in tandem.

For a moment, everyone in the clearing believed it, starting with those closest to the clippers: Maybe this wasn't happening.

St Lenny felt the generator of an alien belief system enter his mind. It began to narrate – using his very own inner voice:

None of this was really happening, it said. Their nervous systems were merely caught in feedback loops. There were names for this: emotional contagion, mass hysteria, shared delusional disorder – all phenomena studied by psychologists since the late 19th century. Before the Psi variant, the mechanism was mirror neurons – the brain cells responsible for the expression "monkey see, monkey do." Now the mechanism for these shared delusions included magnetoreception.

Like the scientists in the New York Times said, brainwaves give off weak electromagnetic fields that their new sense picked up on. The information encoded in these brainwaves could induce shared hallucinations. (However, each person's hallucination might be slightly different – you might see an eight-legged spider while I see an eight-legged beetle.)

In other words, there was no such thing as magic. It was all make-believe.

The hallucinatory flames around the clippers disappeared, along with the faeries and goblins and griffins and gods.

Then, all at once, without forethought, every Heathen around the circle cheered the Heathen battle cry: "REENCHANT THE WORLD!"

They cheered it with such conviction that immediately everyone changed their mind again: Magic was real and reigned supreme.

Ghostly flames around the clippers leapt once more. Beings of myth appeared anew and danced and danced.

The Heathens and guests like Carmen danced with them, waltzing and prancing with medusas and mermaids. A band began to play: a lutist, pan flautist, and timbrel, improvising over one another with supernatural timing. Carmen, rollicking too zealously for her age, tripped and fell. A woman wrapped in golden metal snakes caught her. Carmen gawked at her face and the hallucinatory butterfly near her shoulder from an upsidedown angle.

"So lucky to be a guest of St Lenny," the woman said before hoisting Carmen to her feet.

"She's not my guest." St Lenny had appeared. "She's my new girlfriend."

"Then mark me twice as jealous," said the woman, stroking her snakes.

St Lenny swept Carmen away for a spiraling dance as the Marquis clapped approvingly from the treeline.

Then, just as the festivities had reached a peak, all present went silent. The Prince was in their midst. They could sense it.

A figure emerged from the woods holding a torch. A man. A hero. Their Prince.

His lips were solemn and sensuous beneath a half-mask with stag horns. His cape whispered over the grass and the leaves as he strode toward the clippers. And in his wake....

"What a strange vision," murmured Carmen in Lenny's embrace, as she watched the dark thing prowl after the Prince.

"Which?" asked Lenny. "Oh. You mean the black jaguar."

The clippers whimpered at the big cat's sensuous approach, mottled black fur rippling over muscle.

"That creature is physical, not imaginal. That's the Prince's new familiar. Their minds are now one," said Lenny.

Carmen squinted. "Something is wrong with its face."

"Wrong? No. It simply has two of them! A beautiful Janus feline. The zoo saw it as a 'genetic defect' and was about to murder the poor thing." Lenny clicked his tongue. "The Prince rescued it just in time."

The Prince paused before the circle of flames around the clippers. His familiar went to its haunches. The Prince two took items out of his vest. One he fed the jaguar. The other he spread wide in his hand: a deck of cards. He extended it over the circle of flames toward the organizational psychologist. "Choose one."

Despite his terror, the psychologist looked at the cards skeptically. "The tarot?" he scoffed.

"Not the tarot. A deck of our own."

"Is this some kind of joke?" But the psychologist's feet were doing a little involuntary jig and his hand had already pulled one.

"Show us," the Prince commanded.

The man held it out.

"The Trickster!" the Prince bellowed.

"HURRAH!" The crowd's shout was deafening. The jaguar roared along with them.

The Prince held palms to either side. "A shroom! A shroom! My kingdom for a shroom!"

The jaguar bolted toward the crowd, provoking not a few screams. (Lenny's brethren had yet to get used to the idea that their Prince could control his cat. Poor fools; they had yet to grasp the possibilities of New Magic.) The beast opened one of its mouths to receive something from a new recruit, a bare-chested man covered in tattoos. Then it bounded back to the Prince and dropped the thing into his hand. The Prince raised it aloft: a bundle of mushrooms. "Feed them to the Trickster!" he yelled. "Feed them to the Shroom!"

Carmen was in St Lenny's arms, echoing the chant alongside the crowd: "Feed them to the Trickster! Feed them to the Shroom!"

The Prince willed each clipper into accepting tiny fungi onto their tongues. The mere idea of the Shroom took hold before the physical effects. And then, before long, even these prisoners of the Algorithm were chanting along. Former prisoners of the Algorithm. "Feed us to the Trickster! Feed us to the Shroom!" they shouted.

The crowd rushed forward through the flames to receive their new friends under the light of the moon.

The rest of the night was all a swimmy blur for St Lenny and friends. They dug and found secrets in the earth. They stripped to the nude. They learned songs from the spider-god Anansi. They played rough with the three-eyed jaguar and laughed at the bleeding streaks it painted across their skin.

Lenny embraced Carmen to form the beast with two backs as Dionysus poured wine into their mouths. Carmen had a heart attack and fell – eyes a'giggle, with her hand to her chest – and her grandson's ghost waited for her to join him. A wave of bliss enveloped them from out of nowhere, ecstatic echoes of a group elsewhere in the park rolling on Ecstasy. Their mushroom high became a hippie flip.

Clippers, Heathens, beasts, guests, passersby, and spirits alike became united in love, wondrous love.