Hex

by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

  In terms of sassy’s antidotes, I’ve found a classified ad for “various dry whole medicinal plants” in which an Italian retailer is looking for South American botanicals including maconha brava (Zornia latifolia) leaf. Maconha is the medicinal form of sassy. As far as I can tell, nobody has sold the Italian any maconha, but a Portuguese pharmaceutical company responded requesting information about the Psychotria viridis leaf the Italian is also hunting down. I would ideally like to crust the sassy bark in dried, crushed, and ground maconha powder, so the body receives both the benefit and the injury of the wood in one go.

  This whole thing, if I could detoxify it by say 60 percent, would make a nice product. White chocolate peppermint bark for masochists. You’ll tell me to finish a prototype by Christmas so we can sell it into the gift markets but all I want to do by Christmas is buy a lamp. And the more I stray from it, the more I want to go back to aconite. I think that’s the entry point because it’s straightforward and extensively tested and I can grow an herb box full of monkshood from seed starting next week. They’ll bloom by summer. That’s something I can do, something I even want to do.

  For now I’m just down on my rugless floor admiring how totally democratic it was that the suspected witches were male, in nineteenth-century Africa. Those Liberian man-witches were not repressed. They pursued their craft, taking the word witch as their own, not even aspiring to wizard, even at the risk of suffering. It sucked if they got sassy-barked but the rest of the time they got to conjure whatever they wished. For a gender so boastful, very odd that Western men relinquish their claim to the practice of magic, very odd that they wouldn’t yearn to be witches too.

  Red Hook can turn into a carton of pastel cray-pas one hour before the sun goes down. The buildings are low enough, the water near enough, the sky wide and exposed, every kind of purple rises and stretches to pink. They come earlier and earlier, the purples, and with them a drop in temperature that makes night much more different from day than it used to be. I have to wear pants now. I’m surprised to find myself on the floor tonight, wearing pants. It does help to have the thin cushion of the cotton under me because the floor wood is so old and coated in grime. It’s good here in my home tonight. I can make tortellini better because I have my colander. Until now I’ve been tilting the lid and tilting the pot and I always lose a couple and steam myself.

  It’s going to be okay, this solitude, this lovelessness, this schoollessness, this unstructure, this floating, this sinking. It’s going to suit me. I’m going to mire in it until I’m cooked. Then, you know, I’ll taste great. I just haven’t cooked long enough, Joan. I just haven’t been seasoned. Somewhere in my epicenter I am, I am, delicious. I’m going to lie alone on the floor here while the pinks stretch thin and darken (you asked if I had a home, you didn’t ask if I had a bed, which would have been easier to answer, because I don’t have a bed, who has a bed these days, you do) until one morning I wake up rested.

  DRAGONS

  Tom buzzed my intercom while I was still on the floor asleep in my pants. Mishti had given him my address, he said, and he wanted to see my “new situation.” The comforting thing about this basically uncomfortable visit was that if I had answered the door naked, it would have felt the same. The almost of it, which is the most irresistible part of anything, leads to a simple body yes or no and when it came to me and Tom the almost always asked itself and the no always reverberated. No! we silently shouted at each other, each time our genitals came near. Once that’s been answered, nothing is tantalizing. I noticed that the left side of my chin was crusted in dried drool as I unchained the door and that was fine too.

  “Welcome.”

  “Well Nell, look here, you’ve landed.”

  “Have I?”

  “I’d say.”

  Sometimes we spoke in British accents to mock his forbears.

  “You’ve even got a bathroom sink.”

  I joined him in my minuscule bathroom, peered around his arm into the mirror, and removed the drool from my chin. It felt good to stand with him in such a small room, it felt like being held.

  “I’ve got a sink in the kitchen too,” I said, “and a refrigerator.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “No dish soap yet.”

  “Don’t get greedy.”

  “No bath towels.”

  “No bed?”

  “No bed.”

  Tom smiled and said, “Who has a bed these days?” and I could hear my own voice in his voice. We’d been very good friends. We’d shared a little lingo. The fact of there being no bed now was an additional comfort to us, as it removed even that opportunity for awkwardness. He walked around my castor bean pot to the windows.

  “At least the view.”

  “At most, really.”

  “It took me a very long time to get here.”

  “About as far as Litchfield.”

  “Veronica sends condolences,” Tom joined his palms, “on our love.”

  “My best to her.”

  It was okay that Tom had come, but I didn’t know why he’d bothered. I lived, as he’d said, an hour and a half south of the Upper East Side in a neighborhood that didn’t have a single Pick-A-Bagel. He looked restless and weird and must have wanted something from someone.

  “Have you ever met Joan’s mother?” Tom asked.

  “There it is,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. No, I haven’t, she passed away, but I’ve met her father.”

  “Where?” He seemed to want to ask, How? Why? When? Me too?

  “You know they run a diner—”

  “I didn’t know. I don’t know why you would think that I would know.”

  “That Viand on 82nd, it’s near you. Her father is still behind the cake counter. Kostas, short for Konstantinos, which was incidentally the name of Joan’s dead cat. Her dad is original 1970s New York Greek diner stock. He’s got to be almost eighty.”

  “Your command of Kallas trivia frightens me.”

  “It’s funny because she’s the opposite of a ten-page spiral-bound menu. She is exactly not a cheesecake.”

  “But is she a spinach pie?”

  It was over now, he’d asked and I’d bragged and I considered the interaction complete. I wondered how best to dismiss him. It seemed cruel because he’d transferred from the 4 to the 6 to the F. You would have known how to dismiss him immediately.

  Tom said, “Can I ask you something?”

  Maybe it was just that I knew he would open the can up right then.

  “Must you?”

  “I must. What is the Joan thing with you?”

  “Do you want to rephrase that?”

  “What is your thing with Joan? I wanted to ask while we were together but in that context it seemed . . . aggressive. Now I’m just curious. I’m allowed.”

  A warm blank weather took up the space in my head and I felt ferociously calm.

  I thought about clouds and said, “I don’t know, I like to know her, I like to please her, I would report the weather to Joan if I could.”

  “You could.”

  “Well, I would.”

  Tom shifted his weight around a little and played with his own thumb.

  “I wanted to say there’s something Greek about it,” he said, “but I didn’t know that she’s literally Greek. But yeah, it feels . . . almost religious.”

  I thought about this and said, “Yes, I’m devoted.”

  “Religious but not romantic?”

  “I want to serve her,” I said. “Is that romantic?”

  “It can be?”

  “Yeah I guess it could. It’s just not the focus. Romance. It’s never been my focus.”

  Tom made a face that said, It’s always been my focus.

  And then I think we both agreed to stop. Tom studies dragons, I study the v
enom compounds inside a dragon’s tooth, and that’s the whole divide. Our overlap is that you are the dragon.

  As he walked down my stairs Tom said, “Maybe she wants it.”

  “What?”

  “Romantic devotion.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say and he left the building, as if to mount his horse. It was a mild, clear morning. I got a chill all through my arm hair and registered that my way of life would soon be substantially threatened.

  COOKIES

  “A is for Aconite,” you said in Cookie Monster’s voice, a gross misuse of a voice I usually love.

  “Bite me.”

  “Cool it.”

  “Dig a trench.”

  “Enough.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “That was too easy, Nell.”

  “Fine. Forget it.”

  “Good.”

  “How’s Barry.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Joan always knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  “Love. Men.”

  “Never.”

  “Oh.”

  “Please.”

  “Question or command?”

  “Really neither.”

  “So, please what?”

  “Take a hike.”

  “Upstate?”

  “Vermont. Wherever.”

  “Xanadu?”

  “Your pick.”

  “Zesty,” I concluded, as if jumping into a swimming pool wearing your best fur. You smiled your rare smile because we were jerks who’d gone all the way. Tom will never satisfy you! I left rejoicing. Tom stops at T. I didn’t even blow any dust out of your name. I went straight home victorious to submit nothing to Oxford Systematic Biology.

  CONQUEROR

  After you got over my missing that deadline, you gave me a packet of High John the Conqueror roots. Mishti and I planted them on Halloween. She brought a couple herbal remedy books down to Red Hook, some her mother’s, some her own. I had a few as well. It’s hard not to think in terms of remedies when you spend time planting things, because it’s so absolutely supernatural that anything grows.

  In addition to the Conqueror, I had dandelion, clover, and some masterwort. Masterwort flowers look like the fireworks the child princess of Sweden would set off on her fifth birthday. A burst of tiny pink dots surrounded by a lion’s head of long white tear-shaped petals. They are in the same family as carrots. Mishti brought me two presents she’d ordered from MountainRoseHerbs.com: dragon’s blood resin and myrrh gum resin, because she was in the resin department and myrrh with cinnamon is supposed to be strengthening. She’d decided to spend some of her bloated P&G internship wages at Union Market on cinnamon sticks, bay leaves, dried red mulberries, lemon mint, plantains, a peach, and two heads of ginger. She came in praising the very good flower man on Degraw Street who’d sold her such irises and sunflowers.

  I’d purchased a couple red plastic planters from the Ace Hardware and a whole bunch of dirt. We spread garbage bags out over the floor and sat on them. The dirt sacks kept falling over. Mishti opened Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs and Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide between our legs. It was Halloween night, we were living in a semi-enlightened society, nobody would sassy-bark us, there was no reason not to get witchy.

  I had spent the month very slowly but somewhat comprehensively reviewing basic herbal properties. Mishti’s understanding of organic chemistry is so profound I didn’t want to embarrass myself by volunteering my mushy little speculations, my far-fetched goals, but I knew she could guide us if we started violating any natural orders.

  We lit a couple of those Magic Hour candles that even the most secular shops are selling now, though Mishti said they included all the wrong essences. (“Like, why even bother with Angelica blossom.”) We had the purple Spirit one, the yellow Home one, and the orange Vitality. We also had four huge, blank, and vaguely phallic votives I’d purchased for 79 cents each at IKEA, the day I bought my lamp. We had a king-size bag of Cheetos to make our fingers orange (extra vitality) and a jar of raw honey to spread over our cheeks. I definitely don’t know what we were doing but even you would have admitted we were doing something. Also you would love my lamp. It’s ugly, tall, stoic, and super bright.

  The castors I’d planted a month earlier were still deeply invisible but I wanted to believe I could smell them beginning to exist. We worked with a wormwood cutting I was trying to re-pot and nestled it between the dandelion and pipsissewa in one long planter. Pipsissewa usually fails to germinate from seed, but we tried anyway because that wormwood-dandelion-pip trio is recommended for calling spirits. I agree this was reckless of us, because we didn’t even know which spirits we wanted to call. I thought we would choose retroactively. Cunningham’s suggestion for attaining “success” is lemon balm, clover, ginger, High John the Conqueror, rowan, wahoo, and Winter’s bark. We had everything except the last three, which promised us 57 percent success, which is the most any responsible person could expect.

  Cucumber hinders lust. Its peel bound onto the forehead relieves headache pain (Mishti usually has one) and the seeds promote fertility. This lustless, painless, fertile condition seemed attractive to us so we fashioned cucumber-peel headbands and collected a few seeds in a tumbler. Aspen, caraway, cumin, juniper, garlic, and vetiver work together to prevent theft, so we threw a clove and some ripped-up rye bread and the ground spice into the glass of cucumber seeds and drenched it all with gin and took turns drinking from it while rubbing each other’s bellies, even though there is exactly nothing to steal here. I would mourn if this notebook were stolen. I expect it will be. The city is full of Marion Hawthornes to my Harriet, though if Marion read this particular notebook aloud she’d find it understimulating, seeing as she isn’t you.

  We cut Mishti’s peach into wedges and filled the bottom of a vase with them. We stuck the sunflower and iris stalks one by one into the fleshes of the peach. These three together promote wisdom. We had no bladder wrack to raise the wind. The dragon’s blood resin is supposed to be used by “women seated near an open window, looking outside, at night.” We did that. This resin is high in taspine, an alkaloid for tissue and skin regeneration, quick to seal wounds and stop bleeding, and it may be something I can use as an anti-toxin. Mishti doesn’t know what good taste she has in bad gifts and I didn’t tell her. She said one ounce had cost her ten dollars. I realized I’d never afford as much as I’d need. We took off our cucumber headbands and ate them.

  Three of our candles blew out at the same time and we took that as a sign to go to Sunny’s. It’s just one block over and coincidentally the best bar in Brooklyn. You will never see it, the way I will never see the inside of Jean-Georges. I think you are missing more but I am eating less. It’s mostly that I wish you could know what dodgy industrial Brooklyn feels like on a muggy night full of nothing but paint and seawater, just as you wish you could show me Barry’s family’s summer home in Palm Beach, the light falling on Riverside Drive, the best of things. Just as I wish you wished. In any case Sunny’s has a painting of a palm tree hanging over the gin shelves, so there’s some continuity.

  Mishti entered the bar with her head thrown so far back, and her shoulders so proud and wide, she looked like a high school football player in his graduation photo. I looked like her water boy. Sunny himself passed away about a year ago and they’ve been rotating new bartenders—I don’t know any of their names. They don’t know mine. Everybody knows Mishti’s. She’s been there once.

  “Tequila, Mishti?” someone said. She confirmed and he poured it for her free of charge. I asked for a whiskey soda and he charged me $7.50. Mishti sat on a high stool laughing at me, her shawl pouring from her shoulders to the floor like whitewater. I was wearing a hat inside and I couldn’t say why.

  Mishti took her shot, wiped her mouth, and said, “Barry’s the devil.” We hadn’t be
en talking about Barry, I hadn’t put her up to it, she was simply and unilaterally offering me this kindness.

  “Please sir may I have some more!”

  “He just waits around outside after class and jumps on whoever comes out first. And I always come out first because Joan’s laser-gunning me with her fucking eyebrows by the end of class and I have to basically seek shelter. And then Barry goes, Something something nucleus! and I have to laugh and then he’s so happy I’m laughing.”

  “You don’t have to laugh.”

  “But he’s like . . . really pleasant. He just wiggles, pleasantly, at me. It’s hard to meet that with unpleasantness because he’s having such a nice time.”

  She stared into her empty shot glass and remembered about the devil.

  “It’s gross,” she said, “because then he does it all over again to anyone else.”

  “You want his wiggles for your own.”

  She did and she was embarrassed so she said, “No, I want him to stop wiggling.”

  “Amen.”

  “And he does it with this look in his eyes like he’s just waiting for one crumb, waiting for me to drop one crumb so he can just eat it, really eat it up, like a maniac.”

  “And you’ve never dropped one?”

  “I have total control,” Mishti said, “and he will never touch me.” She looked into the dead center of my eyeballs and said, “He’s disgusting.”

  She wanted to leave it there so we did. The bartender refilled her shot. I didn’t order another drink because I didn’t need one and I couldn’t pay for it.

  “When does the school end your stipend,” I asked, “never?”

  “I don’t know, I just try to stay enrolled.”

  “I need a stipend.”

  “Bartend.”

  The palm tree lit up above my head.

  “Tony,” I said. Nobody answered. “Pete.” “Asher.” “Nathaniel.”

  If you can believe it, the bartender’s name was Nathaniel.

  “Yeah?” he looked at me. In his glance I understood that he wanted me to stop talking and his name was probably George.