White Magic

by Elissa Washuta

  THE SPOT

  I emerged from the swamp with a body covered in death. The power told me I had work to do. I am meant to be porous because my instructions come in through holes I can’t close or even see. They go to a deep place. I do not know what happens there. I washed my swamp skin until I gleamed all over.

  6. Are you curious or are you scared? This is my house, I am your host, and I am offering you two options.

  7. Bracketed addition in original.

  OREGON TRAIL II FOR WINDOWS 95/98/ME & MACINTOSH

  Challenge the Unpredictable Frontier

  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”8

  DOUBLE-CLICK THE CD-ROM ICON. A window will open. Click. Click. New game. Conjure up an escape route. If you want to disembark from the life you’ve known, there’s a trail. But you can’t know the expanse of what’s ahead—staggering vistas, sickening width of the sky, skin stink. Your Oregon Trail exists inside a rectangular window, a finite world with three possible destinations and a handful of ways to die. Click. Go. Elissa, yes, you’ve made it clear you’re on a quest for freedom. But limits will save your life.

  You’re a pharmacist who has come to Council Bluffs in 1855 for the purpose of setting off on a journey west to Oregon City. You’ve already bought a large farm wagon, but you still need to buy the other supplies you’ll need for your journey. You’re accompanied by three others:

  Kurt Cobain, age 30

  Mia Zapata, age 30

  Layne Staley, age 35

  Travel the trail!

  In town, a man with a smart vest and bow tie wants to sell you a package of supplies. Exit this man. You’ve traveled this trail more times than he could imagine. In the dry goods and grocery store, you carve into your stack of pioneer money to buy 1 axe, 200 pounds of bacon, no brandy, no banjo. You buy 3—no, make that 5 boxes of bullets, 2 butcher knives. You buy out the pickles and acquire enough oxen to drag your pickle kegs across the land. This is the best part of the journey, so much like the late-night WinCo trips you make in your “real” life outside this window, now that you’ve moved to the suburbs. The discount rice and bulk beans you buy aren’t sustenance so much as protection from famine.

  Inside the window, you change your mind and buy brandy because, here, you are a white man. In this place that is both safe and unsafe, you can have all the brandy you want. You buy no bags of beads.

  You don’t know what Duffy’s Elixir and James Fever Powder are for, but you know whiskey and tobacco. These were abstractions when you set out on this trail twenty years ago: you weren’t acquainted with the sweet, toxic astringency of spirits. You buy 3 gallons of whiskey because, outside the window, you’ve lost whiskey forever: you just passed the seven-months-sober mark. You’re a miracle. You buy laudanum and a rifle. Morale is high. You depart.

  The choice of starting date used to feel arbitrary. Whether you left in 1840, 1865, or any year in between, you traveled the same trail, albeit one with different stops and travelers. No matter when you leave, you’ll pass Chimney Rock, run into heavy fog and severe thunderstorms, and shoot yourself while hunting. This time, though, you choose 1855, the year your great-great-great-grandfather and eleven other headmen signed the treaty that completed the cession of the Willamette Valley to the United States. Inside the window, you’ll be one of so many settlers who strike out that summer after reading newspaper notices from Washington Territory Governor Isaac Stevens declaring the land open and available.

  Your adventure begins at a river.

  Check the river conditions: the Missouri River appears to be a fairly ordinary river. Caulk the wagons and float: while you watch the wagon’s cover moving from shore to shore, you never even think about going under.

  You traveled west eight years ago in a Chevrolet. Your route was not the trail gouged out of the land in the early nineteenth century: you began on Route 80 in New Jersey, took 90 through the Midwest, 94 through the northern plains, 90 again in Montana, and rode that all the way to your new home, your promised land, your city of destiny: Seattle.

  You have only three memories of that overland adventure: a gas station convenience store where you bought Skittles, a hotel room, and a sign warning you to watch out for rattlesnakes. You, twenty-two and wrecked by liquor and meds, needed a fresh start. In the West, the trees stayed green in the winter. You didn’t know that the West would maim you worse than the East. It wasn’t the overland trail that would do it, three and a half days without cholera or dysentery. Your demise came from provisions you tried not to pack into your wagon.

  You’ve traveled three miles when you get the itch to select your rifle and stare at the flat expanse of green. A squirrel hops across the prairie. You want to kill it, but you are a patient hunter. Your boyfriend of a month, Philip, is a week into his monthlong vacation in China and you haven’t heard a word from him. His motivation for going, in the ways of the whites, is to be enriched by another culture. He is an honest man. That is why he doesn’t say he’ll miss you.

  If you had any real patience, you wouldn’t have committed to the first guy you went on a Tinder date with after being dumped by another. You and Philip have nothing in common—he’s a programmer, a libertarian, an optimist, a board game enthusiast, and an upper-middle-class white man who keeps saying his parents met in Mensa, which he calls a “social club”—but you’re attracted to him and he’s harmless. What is the right fit, anyway? People say relationships stop feeling like magic eventually, so you figure you might as well start one without any spark to lose. Anyway, you have no frame of reference for the right fit, only models of danger, disrespect, and indifference.

  No deer, no bears, no meat. You shoot a jackrabbit. Firing 3 times, you shot 4 pounds of game and were able to carry all of it back to your wagon. If you continue to hunt in this area, game will be scarce.

  You stop in town. A woman with a bonnet tells you about a party that came through, “several mean scoundrels” who “tore up the local saloon and right terrorized some of the people here.” The white man’s mask you wear inside the window has her fooled. You’ve torn up your share of saloons. No, that’s not right—you’ve torn yourself up in your share of saloons.

  Twenty years ago, you, your parents, and your brother huddled around a PC monitor and started your first journey after coming home from an after-church mall stroll. The world inside the window soon felt like another room in your house. Now you’re alone in your apartment and it’s getting dark.

  Moving out to the suburbs seemed like a good idea in the winter, when you were trying not to drink. You wanted a big place and you wanted to be as alone as your heart felt. You chose a suburb where you’d seen evergreens; a road that gives way to Puget Sound, where cars cross the dotted stretch of the map only by ferry; a block with salt-water-smelling air; an apartment so large, bare-walled, and under-furnished that your mumblings to your cat echo around the living room only three people have visited in the nine months it’s been yours.

  Now you’ve lifted your forearms off the condensation-slick tavern slab that your spine curled over like a fern that would never open. There are no bars within walking distance of the new place. You spend evenings in your apartment, watching your brain do the same thing over and over, which is scan itself for the flaw that is going to kill you. While your body stays safe at home, you need to travel out of your isolation through this window.

  So you’ve come back to the trail, where you have someone to talk to. The faces are more familiar than the teachers and clergy who instructed you in how to live, the preformed lines of dialogue a part of you in the way Bible verses nev
er were. If they’re living in your memory, are these people not real?

  In New Jersey, the only Indians you knew were the two others in your house and the ones who lived in TV and helped white people find their inner noble savages. Disney’s Pocahontas showed you Indians who were shot by the colonizers they loved; the year of its release, you first slipped through this window into the trail, where you sucked venom out of wounds, ignored any ailment that wouldn’t kill you, and drove your oxen until they couldn’t stand. You were always a good colonizer.

  You continue.

  You shoot at a deer with your shotgun and miss. When it runs across the grass, you feel as if someone has a finger in a hole in your chest, stretching the wound. You stare at the neat line of the horizon, wait for another animal apparition, and wish you could administer some laudanum. In another window, you ask, What is laudanum? Laudanum is drugs. That you surmised as a child fascinated by the teachings of D.A.R.E. You wanted to see visions and act like you weren’t yourself. Laudanum is an alcohol-based opium tincture wouldn’t have meant anything to you. Things have happened. You have grown. You understand laudanum.

  You thought the West would free you from the version of yourself you’d gotten tangled up in. Instead you became more bound to it than ever, tethered to the toilet bowl, wed to caustic drink. You concocted laudanum from whiskey and painkillers, mixing up a patent medicine you were sure could cure all your ailments, your own version of Duffy’s Elixir.

  But the dry goods and grocery store was miles back. Laudanum is sold only in town. You’ve checked every penny-ante outpost on this trail, just to see. And anyway, no trail ailment is improved by administering laudanum; there’s always a better way to heal.

  You still long to yank yourself out of feeling. You get so lonesome you go to the high-end grocery store to talk to the artisan yogurt bar man who always mentions his time as a schoolteacher. Inside the window, you’re always with your party. You shoot your rifle at a deer and it turns from a grazing thing into a lump. The hole in your chest closes. You have a purpose here. Firing 1 time, you shot 166 pounds of game and were able to carry all of it back to your wagon. If you continue to hunt in this area, game will become scarce.

  Two years ago, you began weekly sessions with a therapist whose office was filled with crystals. The only thing you knew about astrology was your sun sign, but your therapist said you were experiencing your Saturn return. The planet, once every thirty years or so, returns to the spot in the zodiac it occupied when you were born. In this rite of passage, Saturn, celestial taskmaster, breaks apart and reassembles your life. Your job became intolerable when your boss snapped into tyranny, your first book came out, your long relationship with Kevin ended, you moved outside the city, you got sober.

  FOUR OF CUPS, featuring a person under a tree, arms crossed, refusing the cup offered by an extended hand. After weeks of this, you understood it was time, once and for all, after fits and starts and trials and failures and dry spells flooded, to get sober.

  But you still needed to buy the other supplies you’d need for your journey: a new moon webinar, a book of spells, a baggie of dried mistletoe, a tin of incense, a tiny cauldron. You recently turned an end table into an altar and learned to read the shapes left in a spent candle’s wax, because you’ve come to believe you might be a witch like that one character on The Magicians, a show you and Philip watch: Julia, denied entrance to the school for magicians where her protagonist friend matriculates, becomes what they call a hedge witch, cast out on her own, forced to learn magic without instruction. The internet says hedge witches are real, and you haven’t told anyone, but you think you might be one.

  You’ve been hoping for a sign, something to make you feel in your gut that it’s real, not just TV. One day, while you were frying tofu and kept getting bitten by the tiny drops of oil popping from the pan, you thought, I just want one thing in my life to be a little easier. And less painful. Just one thing. Maybe I should get a FryDaddy. Hours later, outside your office on campus, the free-book table had no books, only an unopened box holding a brand-new FryDaddy. God is everything or he is nothing, your sponsor likes to say. That was the moment the mystery dropped from your head to your gut. You have always been in the mystery. The choice is not to be a witch or not be a witch, not to believe in magic or to believe in reality, but to be an open door or a closed one. You are good at making choices. You continue.

  You stop at Pawnee Village. A man with a porcupine quill headdress says, “Now is a good time for trading.” He says if you don’t want to, perhaps you’re not a friend of the Pawnee. No! You need him to be your friend. As a child here, you talked to every Indian twice. They dressed like the Indians in Dances with Wolves, not in oversized Looney Tunes T-shirts like you, but you still knew they were your people. The white men in cotton vests and women in bonnets were not your people, everyone wringing their hands over wagon dust or pushing you to get a move on.

  Tall Rain Cloud has 1 5-lb. sack of tobacco that he’ll trade for 1 ox. He sees you as another white man, a taker who owes a debt. You need your oxen more than his friendship. You move on.

  You meet a Pawnee woman with long hair. She looks sort of like you do under the white man mask. She says, “Why do you bother me? I don’t want to trade. The things that we get from the white travelers don’t make up for all that we lose.”

  “Tell me more,” you say.

  She says, “We didn’t know the whooping cough, measles, or the smallpox until your people brought them to us. Our medicine cannot cure these strange diseases, and our children are dying.”

  “Do you have any advice?” you say.

  “No. I just want you to leave us alone.”

  So you do.

  You once believed that there were two kinds of Indians: the real ones in buckskins who used every part of the buffalo and died before 1870, and the ones like you. But then you thought about the black-and-white photo hanging in your hallway. You’d seen these two women a dozen times a day your whole life, and you knew they were your relatives. The standing woman wore a black Edwardian dress with a high neck and puffed shoulders; the seated woman’s black shirt was covered in white threads you later learned (or guessed—you can’t recall) were dentalia, skinny shells of scaphopods used for trade and high-status adornment. Your great-great-grandmother’s dress was covered in money.

  You looked sort of like the women. The women were Indians. You knew the best way to be an Indian was to look the part. But you didn’t feel real yet, not as an Indian, not in any way at all.

  At Mormon Island, you wonder when you’ll encounter missionaries, but there’s nobody but a sad-faced lady who will trade you 228 pounds of salt pork if that’s what you want. You don’t need any meat, and want has no place here: you’re supposed to carry what keeps you alive. Morale is high.

  This trail began as missionary work. In 1836, Methodists Marcus and Narcissa Whitman went west with other missionaries and fur traders. The Whitmans established a mission at Waiilatpu, near the Walla Walla River in present-day Washington, which was unceded Cayuse land. They intended to save Indian souls. The Cayuse didn’t want to be saved. In 1843, Marcus Whitman returned east, then came west again with a thousand pioneers, making the first “Great Migration.” With settlers came disease. An 1847 measles epidemic killed half the Cayuse people, including most of the children. At the mission, the Whitmans treated whites and Cayuse, but more whites survived, and the Cayuse retaliated for treachery and held the missionaries responsible. They killed the Whitmans and a dozen other whites and destroyed the mission. But the white people opened more. Some of them made Native converts pledge, “From this point on, I will be a white man.”

  Your gun is not for killing people—yours is a fun gun. On the hunt, you choose. The hunt isn’t like the scripted trail-goer dialogue or guidebook-defined path. You aim where you like and you shoot what you please. You can do anything. A gun is a possibility machine.

  Before Philip left for China, you drew him three tarot
cards. He doesn’t believe in anything, but when you talk about tarot and astrology he listens and doesn’t tell you belief makes you stupid, so he’s an improvement. THE DEVIL: “This means fucking,” you said. He said nothing.

  Now he’s on the other side of the world, and still nothing. You tell yourself maybe he’s busy or dead, maybe he doesn’t have internet, maybe he’s fucking. Your new psychiatrist gave you, along with your new PTSD diagnosis, language for the way your body holds its breath so hard that even at a cellular level, you feel taut: you’re triggered. Every violation came with new filaments of memory you’d associate with the harm, all forming a long rope of disorder. You’re always unconsciously seeking a sign that a man will kill you soon. Silence trips your wire.

  You can’t explain any of this to Philip. He’s a regular at Burning Man. He has a face like a little baby’s, unmarked by pain. When he hits your ass hard during sex, you can’t say anything, because you know this is called spanking; this is not being hit, this is not the same as when your first rapist punched the wall, and you’re supposed to be good, giving, and game, so you bury your face in the pillow and you are not triggered, you are good at fucking and you are giving yourself instructions not to cry and you are, above all, game: a doe, bending your face toward grass.