Stevie, exasperated with this man, says, “I’m talking to you!”
Earlier, speaking into the camera, Lindsey says, “It’s odd sitting here singing all this stuff about myself, you know, it’s, uh … You sort of learn to disassociate and to sort of be … [finger quotes] professional about it, but …” He smiles and shakes his head. “You know, it’s, uh, it’s pretty amazing, you know, all this time later, that there would be those subjects being dealt with in a really deep manner.”
The documentary ends with the beginning of the Say You Will tour. Lindsey and Stevie walk out onstage holding hands. He leads; she follows. We don’t see who reached for the other.
The official music video for “In the Air Tonight” is, for the most part, about Phil Collins’s face: bright white, marked with deep shadows, it takes up the screen. It fades while the crescent moon brightens behind his eye socket. The face of Phil Collins floats disembodied in the darkness. Somehow, I hadn’t seen this video until I began looking—for what will probably be the last time—for the D.A.R.E. video.
Cut to Phil Collins slumped in a chair in an empty room, looking out the window at a specter, his own white silhouette under the moon.
Cut to Phil Collins in a corridor, trying to open doors that can be opened only from the outside. He, on the other side of the door, stands and looks into the obliterating white light, as though he cannot cross the threshold until he’s invited in. He fades into darkness.
This is the closest to finding the D.A.R.E. video that I might ever come.
The camera returns, repeatedly, to his face.
Even if I did find the D.A.R.E. video, seeing it again would only serve to puncture its sac of nighttime hanging inside my heart. Still, I suck on the thrill of the search like a plastic cup of garbage whiskey, but the promise of a drink was never going to lead to discovery or completion or the kind of ending I want: resonant, a point of arrival. Drinking was only about getting me back to the time before I knew about all there was to want and all the pain it was going to bring me. D.A.R.E. TO RESIST DRUGS AND VIOLENCE, reads a banner on the D.A.R.E. website. The program did not teach me that drugs and violence were holding hands. I learned it without cops or nuns to help.
This essay, I thought, could end with a look back at my entire drinking history and my triumphant recovery, but that’s boring. Anyway, I only want to talk about Stevie, who now, sober and alone, paints angels and writes poems about Game of Thrones characters. She says she likes the brutality. I only want to watch every YouTube video of “Silver Springs.” Even though the former lovers’ turn toward each other is now clearly performative, there is truth in this fiction. Celebrity gossip sites have yet to report on the contents of the forthcoming Stevie Nicks biography, so I don’t yet know that Lindsey threw her onto the floor during one argument, bent her over a car and choked her during another. Carl has never been violent, never evil, never anything but a complicated man who doesn’t know what he wants. I stay affixed to possibility because of the violence that preceded him: here is a man who seems good enough, so I should never let him get away.
If I watch all the “Silver Springs” live videos, I believe I will find the end of the story about my need. I watch Stevie turn to Lindsey, her shoulders pulled up tight like the arched back of a black cat, her eyebrows a bolt from a witch’s finger, her mouth straining with a howl, Time cast a spell on you, but you won’t forget me, while the camera watches Lindsey’s ringed finger choke the strings his right hand drives past, over and over, boot slamming stage floor, carotid bulging as he growls that you’ll never get away, growls that you will be haunted, and the chains draped from Stevie’s mic stand quake. Lindsey told the Dallas Morning News in 1993, “It’s pivotal between being sad about things that have basically died for you and being able to move forward and find other things that are alive for you.” It sounds like the little lies that come to me and ask to be called epiphanies. When I see Stevie and Lindsey turn away from each other as the song dwindles toward its end, I rewind to the moment before she turns to him, and I watch them in that pivot, climbing into the hole in front of all of us, climbing out while the camera pans so far out that she and her black shroud disappear in the darkness.
1. So many epigraphs! Are you wondering whether I’m going to do this with every essay? How does that make you feel?
a. Do you love epigraphs? If so, skip the rest of this footnote.
b. Do you hate epigraphs? Do they make you mad? Do they bore you? Did you absorb what you just read? Are the epigraphs for you or are the epigraphs for me? Is that a leading question?
2. The river has names—like wimahl and nči-wána—given to it by the peoples who have lived in relationship with it forever. Columbia, a name assigned by white people as a tribute to the first ship they took up the river, is currently widely used among Native peoples still in relationship with it, including my family, and it’s the name by which I know the river.
THE SPIRIT CORRIDOR
All my life,
since I was ten,
I’ve been waiting
to be in
this hell here
with you;
all I’ve ever
wanted, and
still do.
—Alice Notley
If a man was never to lie to me. Never lie me.
I swear I would never leave him.
—Louise Erdrich, “The Strange People”3
HERE’S A RIDDLE:
You’re standing in front of two doors. One leads to heaven, the other to hell. A guardian stands in front of each. One guardian always tells the truth. The other always lies. You don’t know which is which. You want the door to heaven, but you can ask only a single question to one guardian.
What is the question?
I don’t know and I don’t care. I’ve been looking for a different door.
FRONT DOOR OF CARL’S HOUSE
We were new at each other, together every untied minute. On a late spring night, he opened the door and stood before me as a dim shape against lamplit white walls. The image of his V-necked clavicles was seared into me that night, like the small vision hole seared into the retina of someone who stares into the solar eclipse. “Wow,” he whispered. “You weren’t here. And now you’re here.”
I looked into his eyes, which were my eyes copied into a different skull. When one of us was made, the maker started with the eyes, accidentally made duplicate pairs, and built two different humans around the eyeballs.
He was right. I was there, alone, then here, poised at the threshold between lawn and living room. Unreal.
THE FOUR DOORS OF THE LITTLE HOUSE
The primary setting of my first Ohio winter is a seven-hundred-square-foot brick rental house built sometime before 1900. People have asked whether it’s haunted. I used to say it wasn’t, and I would know. I salted the corners and doorways before I unloaded my car. Despite the tightness of the space, the outside sounds of football revelry and garbage collection, the broken window, and the brick walls’ tiny holes that let subzero air flow inside, I like the little house and its secret-garden yard, and I wouldn’t mind staying a while. But I learned that my new city, Columbus, was on the short list of possible locations for Amazon’s second headquarters, so I’ve started looking for my forever house before it’s too late. I feel myself pulling away from the little house, trying not to love it.
The bathroom door’s cracked antique knob is accompanied by a keyhole without a key. The bedroom door has a modern knob, the kind with a button that can lock it from the inside but no place for the insertion of a key. There’s no need for a locked interior door here. Everyone is in the bedroom: me, my crystals, and the ghost who runs fingers through my hair as I try to get tired in bed. Inside the bedroom there’s a door to the murder basement with thousands of tiny blue nuggets of rat poison clustered on the dirt floor.
I’d been in the little house for a few weeks when I tried to come inside after gardening, but the storm door shut me out: the k
nob turned while the latch stayed put. I turned the knob until my hands were blistered. I wanted to try going in through the bedroom window, but when I began to lift the screen, the storm window slammed shut on my forearm, cutting a bloody line, and would not budge open. I returned to the door and turned its knob until my blisters ruptured. This house is testing me, I thought. If I can figure out the answer, I can open the door.
The answer was that I needed to ask for help. I am loath to, ever, because it’s only when I’ve needed something from somebody that I’ve been let down. But when a stranger walked by, I asked him to help me.
He looked at the door. He turned the knob. He said, “If this were a movie, we’d use a credit card.” He wished me good luck and walked on. I wedged my garden spade into the space between door and frame, and the door opened.
How do you make a house happy? How do you appease it when it never tells you what it wants? When I started house shopping, the storm window began to rattle with every gust. A streak as dark as dried blood appeared, cutting a diagonal across the exposed brick of my bedroom wall. The gate ceased to latch and now slams shut and open all night in the wind. I think of boyfriend after boyfriend who told me, after we split, I didn’t realize how awesome you were. I took you for granted. All of them but Carl, who went into the underworld after he left me, and who emerged only once to fuck me before disappearing again. He has never been in this house, but I’ve filled it with him.
The house is a boyfriend. Or the house is me. Or the house is a person with its own plan.
BEFORE ASKING A QUESTION, REMEMBER
A riddle is different from a joke. Both rely on double meanings represented through language, but a riddle is meant to be worked on in pursuit of a solution, while a joke’s punch line should do most of the work. I hate punch lines. I distrust humor. I’m not comfortable with the notion that I have all the information I need, because I’ve never known that to be true.
DOOR WITHOUT KNOB
According to astrology internet, Venus has disappeared from the night sky and now travels through the underworld. When she is in this place, we are alone. Before she gets out, we will lose something. Lose isn’t the right word—it will be a sacrifice.
FAKE MARK TWAIN’S INDEX-O-VATOR
The Claymation film The Adventures of Mark Twain was made to delight strange adults, but I felt it had been crafted for my childhood alone. The premise, as presented in the film’s text preface: Halley’s comet returned in 1835, as it does every seventy-five years. That year, Mark Twain was born, so he believed he and the comet shared a destiny. He wrote, “The Almighty has said, no doubt, ‘There go those two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’” Twain noted the comet’s return in 1910, wrote that “It is the final chapter,” and died.
That’s pretty close to reality; the film that follows is fantasy. The white-suited Twain takes off in his airship to meet Halley’s comet and die. It’s a film with more strangeness than plot: Twain’s black-suited doppelgänger haunts the airship, mourning; the Index-O-Vator, a doorway-turned-portal, offers passage to other decks and worlds pulled from Twain’s body of work. Mostly, this film is about death, the only certainty we’re born into and the only adventure we’re all assured.
Looking for the facts, I go down the Google rabbit hole and end up at a website that claims that the death of Twain’s wife, Olivia, in 1904, compounded by the death of their daughter Jean in 1909, led him to die of a broken heart in 1910, and that he was able to predict he’d go out with the comet because those deaths made his own inevitable. The source article has unintentional font changes and broken image links, so I have to wonder about it. There may be a fact-checked book in the library that would put an end to my speculation, but it’s cold outside and I’m curious right now and I’ve got this portal right here that can tell me anything I could want to know.
I didn’t come in with a comet. I know of no astrological significance to being born in a year when a comet makes itself known to those on earth. I was born close to a total solar eclipse. Astrologers say eclipses mark beginnings and endings: they bring people into our world and lives, and they take people out. Lunar and solar eclipses generally occur in pairs (sometimes triads), the lunar eclipse at the full moon and the solar at the new, but only when the moon is near one of its nodes. Eclipse pairs arrive twice a year. When will I die? That’s the wrong question. I can’t predict the year. But I have a feeling I’m going out between eclipses.
I think I began demanding repeat screenings of The Adventures of Mark Twain at four, the age I remember becoming a person. In that golden time, I could get up in the dead of night to play, unencumbered by the nonsense of a schedule. Sometimes little children know more than a human should. Sometimes children are psychic, according to paranormal internet. Actually, some of the internet says all children are psychic, until they’re taught that normal people don’t see visions or hear thoughts, so they suppress their abilities until they’re gone. I don’t remember what I heard or saw, only what I felt: sheer panic. At the grocery store, I screamed. At day care, I lost a doll’s hand and threatened to suffocate myself with a sheet at nap time. Home—place of books, cats, parents, and tree canopy—was a refuge. I was bad. A “little divil,” in the loving parlance of the coal region. Why not? The devils knew as much as the angels, so, almost everything. I didn’t know as much as an angel or a devil but I knew something everyone else seemed not to: something horrible was going to happen to me.
The Adventures of Mark Twain is best known for the Satan scene. Through the door-portal of the Index-O-Vator, the children depart from Twain to enter a starless void-world a chipper voice introduces as “The Mysterious Stranger,” which is the title of one of Twain’s books. Out of the pink clay earth rises a red-armor-clad, headless, person-shaped being. A flat white mask on a stick appears in the being’s hand.
“Hello,” the being says, its voice metallic, stilted, and ominous.
“Who are you?” Becky asks.
The mask becomes human-featured, the color of Twain’s flesh, with holes remaining where eyes might go if this were a person, which it almost is, but persons have heads. “An angel.” Its name is Satan.
While Satan talks, the mask changes, first turning wizened, then furred with mustache and brows like Twain’s as the being invites the children into the void. The face becomes placid and smooth again when they enter. Satan is welcoming at first, a magician making fruit appear in their hands. Is this hell? It’s not heaven. Satan makes a little castle and builds life around it, then destroys everything while the mask turns flushed and horned. The children aren’t having fun anymore. While Satan tells the children that people are of no consequence, the mask’s eyes widen to skull-sockets and the fleshy smoothness gives way to the sharpness of bone before turning to a skull by the time the children run back through the portal. The Index-O-Vator disappears into the earth and the being stands alone in the meadow.
“Life itself is only a vision, a dream,” Satan tells us. With the wave of a hand, the plants wilt and the ground breaks into rocks. “Nothing exists save empty space and you, and you are but a thought.” The rocks fall away, the stranger’s shape disappears into the void, and only the mask remains as a speck in Twain’s eye as his face fades in.
This may have been how I met Satan. All my religious picture books concerned unfallen angels and child saints. The priests’ homilies were celebratory and practical, telling us how to be good. I liked clay Satan and wanted to play with it. God the Father was the one to fear: he had all the rules and expectations. Both heaven and hell terrified me because they were forever. The only difference I could see was that hell was hot. It would be easier to get comfortable in hell than to succeed in striving for heaven. Once I began school, I sketched courses through hell’s tortures: magma moats, poisoned spikes, skin-shredding blades, fire meadows. I wasn’t afraid of pain. I was afraid of the omnipotent one’s pressure, because I knew it.
CRYING ROOM DOOR
I liked church because of the mysteries: joyful, sorrowful, glorious. I liked that my dad called one of God’s three persons the Holy Ghost, like a character in a book of scary stories.
In Catholic school, I learned that some supernatural truths could not be accessed through human reason. I took this to mean that God kept secrets, like I did. My secrets were that I wanted to kiss the Ninja Turtles, I had a twin brother nobody could see, and I peed in the closet. God’s secrets were about other worlds.
In the New Testament, though, mysterion (μυστήριον) doesn’t mean mystery, something impossible or difficult to understand; it refers to what is mystical, with a spiritual meaning inaccessible without initiation. The priests said we could never understand how God impregnated Mary, how Jesus rose from the dead, or how Mary was pulled to heaven. But I was instructed in assumption before gravity, resurrection before biological death, and immaculate conception before reproduction. The problem with mystery is that I have always understood completely. I never fully cultivated a sense of reason in which what’s called supernatural would be anything but natural.
The church was dark, built from wood beams and black pillars. Off to the side, in the crying room, there was a statue of the Virgin. I wanted to be secreted inside with her. I cried through masses, hoping Mom would take Nate and me to that hiding place so I could watch the porcelain woman, in case she might weep with me.
FORBIDDEN DOOR
Before I was born, I was halved. New Age internet says many of us are this way, half-hearts looking for completion. I’ve been looking for my lost parts forever, so I am never not serious in love. It could be anyone, I used to think. I just had to find him and lock myself into him. I tried so hard to force the fit that sometimes I barely noticed that the force had broken me.
White Magic Page 5