White Magic

by Elissa Washuta

  Carl and I watched the bridge open for a pirate ship, complete with men in eye patches. I explained that it was a simple trunnion bascule bridge, using a system of counterbalance and leverage; the installation of an automatic control for the bridge-opening machinery made openings quicker and reduced the bump at the meeting of the spans, the moment that wore on the machinery more than any other.

  He was quiet. I worried I’d been showing off. We watched the bridge close, and after it returned to its flat line, he said, “That part seems like a metaphor. That one spot that takes the most wear.”

  The next day, he told me he didn’t want to move in together, not so soon, but he hadn’t said so because he wanted to say what I wanted to hear. I hadn’t been asking about doing it right away, but he knew that’s what I wanted. While I told him I appreciated his honesty, waves of an impending earthquake rippled through my core. I wished I could leave my shaking body, suddenly alert, afraid I was not safe and would be abandoned again. Sobs quaked in my gut until I fell asleep.

  Seven months earlier, my bipolar diagnosis had been reversed, a PTSD diagnosis added. My therapist taught me to locate panic attacks in my body before they began and track them as they erupted. At first, the change in diagnosis brought on a mild identity crisis—bipolar disorder had been a major part of my routine and my self-conception for most of my adult life—but more troubling was the loss of my belief that, in medicating for an illness with chemical and structural causes in the brain, I had control. PTSD was the external turned internal, a constant string of triggerings, a body and mind set against the world.

  A few weeks after we started dating, I told Carl about the rapes and assaults—not secret, but not easy to bring up in conversation, and he hadn’t read my writing (and still hasn’t, but anyway). He asked, “What are your triggers?” I said, “Silence. Not knowing what a partner is thinking. A man who’s not talking can seem like he’s fine, then a switch flips and he’s angry. Angry and dangerous, sometimes. I’m afraid of a man when he’s not saying something. I’m afraid of not knowing what could be in there.”

  After I learned what was hidden in Carl’s silence, which began to crowd our relationship, I realized that not knowing was not the problem: the problem was my intuition sparking like the flame of a lighter, and I feared the way it burned, the way it illuminated what I didn’t want to see.

  The morning after my panic attack, I went to the bridge still quaking and pulled tarot cards for a relationship spread. How he feels about me: THE TOWER, two people flung from the windows of a burning keep. How I feel about him: FOUR OF CUPS, an outstretched hand offering a cup, a person with crossed arms refusing it. Obstacles: THREE OF WANDS, the back of a robed man standing at a cliff’s edge, looking at the mountains beyond. Outcome: DEATH, a black-armored skeleton riding a white horse while the sun rises or sets.

  A couple of days after his admission and my panic attack, we went to an island. Weeks earlier, we had agreed it would be good to take a trip after his return, so I’d booked a couple of nights in a “tent cabin,” on the beachfront of the Salish Sea; it turned out to be a translucent plastic hothouse warmed by our sweating bodies. We hiked in misery, dined in misery, fucked in misery. He said everything was fine, or said nothing. On the ferry back, I said, “You keep getting quiet, and I just need you to tell me what’s wrong.”

  He paused. He did not look at me. He said, “Sometimes you irritate me so much, I don’t know what to do.”

  In 1926, Mary Iley, who was Cowlitz, told the shark girl story to Thelma Adamson, a white ethnographer who edited it and included it in Folk-Tales of the Coast Salish:11

  There were five Crow girls and one girl who was small in size. The small girl had no father or mother. She was a dangerous being; whenever she played with children, she fought terribly. She would tear the flesh from their faces. The Crow girls, accompanied by the small girl, went in a canoe to an island to dig small camas. The small girl alone could dig as many camas as four or five girls together. She got more than all the others. Since they got only a few, she divided with them. They visited the island four times. The fourth time, the Crow girls sang,

  I’m going to have a best-love,

  A rich man.

  They did not know that the small girl was a dangerous being. She sang a song of her own, to let the pretty girls know that they could not underrate her,

  I’ll have the best man of all,

  A richer man than yours.

  As usual, she dug a great many camas. Although small in size, she was rather oldish. By this time, a quite desirable man had taken a fancy to her. On their fifth visit to the island, the other girls said, “We’ll throw her away, so that she can never get back home.” “Put your basket into the canoe first and then go back after your digging stick,” they said. They had already taken her stick. When she started to go back for it, they pushed off and left her there.

  A rich man, who had a number of wives and many slaves, lived near the island. One of his slaves was Raccoon. She was on the island trying to dig camas but could do nothing but scratch around. She had her basket full but there was more rubbish than camas. After a while, something caught her attention. “Who can that be over there?” she thought and crooked her finger at the person. The person came over to her; it was a girl. “What are you doing?” the girl asked. “I’m trying to dig camas but I can’t manage to get anything but the tops,” Raccoon said. “Well, I’ll give you mine,” the girl said and filled Raccoon’s basket.

  The women were surprised when little Raccoon came home with her basket full. The fourth time, her master asked, “Did you do this yourself?” “No, a girl over there did it for me,” Raccoon said. “How big is she?” he asked. “She’s as big as I,” Raccoon said. The man went over to see the girl. “Where did you come from?” he asked. “The Crow girls left me here. I dug with them here for several days and then one day they went off and left me.” “I’ll take you home with me. You can be my wife.” “Do you have any wives?” the girl asked. “Lots of them,” the man answered. “And do you have any property?” she asked then. “Thirty-seven slaves,” the man said. Raccoon was his youngest slave. “All right,” the girl said. “You’ll be well-to-do when you become my wife,” the man said, “I’ll forbid my other wives to whip you.”

  The man treated all of his wives well. There was plenty of work to do, berries to pick and camas to dig. The small girl always managed to get more than any of the others because she was a fast worker. The other women loved her at first because she was such a good worker. But gradually they began to fear her, for when she became angry, she fought them terribly and nearly killed them. At times, she also fought fiercely with her husband and nearly killed him too. Finally, she became pregnant. When her baby was born, she killed it and ate it. By this time, everybody was afraid of her. At last she killed her husband and all the small children that had not already run away to escape her. “I’m going to leave you,” she said one day. She went to the ocean and became a dangerous being. When a person, she was much like a shark, and it was a shark that she became. She was the best possible worker; she could work and work and dig fast. When she did any basketry work, her fingers moved with great speed.

  On the last day of June, I saw the Invader superyacht. At 163.7 feet, the Invader is one of America’s one hundred largest yachts, worth more than $40 million. When it passed under the bridge, I saw expressionless people in dark suits standing on its deck. I took their photo, tweeted it, and immediately worried I’d invaded their privacy. But what is a superyacht for? It wants to be witnessed taking up space, never committing to any patch of the earth.

  In July, a time for drying clams and picking blackberries, I began having panic attacks every few days. “What are you thinking?” I kept asking Carl. Nothing. Or: [Pause] Thinking about my schedule for the week. Or: [Pause] Nothing.

  When Pokémon Go was released, I was slow to download it, even though, as a kid, I’d tried to catch all the little monsters. I didn’t care about g
ames or anything else; I was collecting information, tracking Carl’s Instagram likes. I woke up one morning after another night of useless sleep broken a dozen times by my cat’s howling and my own nightmares, and, drinking my coffee, considering the interminable day ahead, I decided to install the app.

  The bridge, I quickly learned, was the site of two PokéStops (GPS-designated landmarks that function as collection sites for items) and a gym (for Pokémon training). My tower was a PokéStop; the description read, “Rapunzel: The siren of the ship canal.” The bridge operator’s tower was the other: “Gate Keeper: Late at night on June 15th of 1917 the first vehicle crossed the Fremont Bridge.”

  In my tower, I attached a lure to my PokéStop. The lure’s gameplay purpose was attracting Pokémon; because it was visible to all players, it began attracting people from the Google building, and I watched as they gathered near the base of my tower, staring at phones. I wondered about their inner lives a little, and whether they ever had to do night math, the calculations that kept me from sleep as I worried about how long my money would last before I had to leave Coast Salish land.

  Instead of writing, I caught creatures:

  Oddish, which “buries itself in soil to absorb nutrients from the ground using its entire body. The more fertile the soil, the glossier its leaves become.”

  Clefairy: “On every night of a full moon, groups of this Pokémon come out to play. When dawn arrives, the tired Clefairy return to their quiet mountain retreats and go to sleep nestled up against each other.”

  Drowzee: “If your nose becomes itchy while you are sleeping, it’s a sure sign that one of these Pokémon is standing above your pillow and trying to eat your dream through your nostrils.”

  Eevee, with “an unstable genetic makeup that suddenly mutates due to the environment in which it lives. Radiation from various stones causes this Pokémon to evolve.”

  None of these was the creature I was looking for.

  I spent the summer searching for more details about why a'yahos left, but I’ve already shared everything I found. The resolution of this essay will not, as I had hoped, be some answer about exactly which acts of dredging, excavating, regrading, chopping, filling, and otherwise “improving” would have driven the serpent spirit from the place that had always been its home. Maybe a'yahos knew what was coming and wanted to leave first. Maybe I’m assigning a'yahos the abandonment motives I know. But a'yahos was not a man.

  When a hypothesis is wrong, what then?

  A long time ago, animals were people. Nobody was fully animal or fully person, as we think of a person now—these delineations appeared after the Changer transformed the world and turned the Animal People into animals, people, mountains, tideflats, and rivers. Most Cowlitz traditional stories (like those of Salish Sea peoples) come to us from the belly of the change. The Changer turned some Animal People into the spirits that watch over the land.

  When a'yahos lived at the lake, healers visited it to tap into its power. They did so with caution, because that power could turn a weak person wicked.

  A'yahos is gone, and I don’t know where it went or when it left.

  Will the new people drive away all the spirits? Who will keep watch then?

  A regrade moves earth like a landslide. Mining and fracking—cracking deep rocks with high-pressure fluid injections—have begun inducing earthquakes worldwide. A'yahos is easy to wonder about because it has a shape: horned, two-headed, hot-eyed. Shapeless, unimaginable malevolence is what gets me: on constant watch, I wait for it, but it never arrives because it never leaves.

  It didn’t take long for internet people to start talking shit about Pokémon. I began feeling self-conscious when I walked around Capitol Hill after dark, looking for invisible animals and trying to exhaust my brain. I could feel a threat in my body but couldn’t locate its source. I kept my brain occupied with the to-do list of Pokémon to catch.

  I hoped to find a rare water creature under the bridge in the dim, sea-dank place accessed by stairs descending from the towers. I rarely went down: opening the door to the bridge belly would sound an alarm in the operator’s tower, and if I hadn’t phoned already to warn them, I’d get a call asking me if I was down below, and for what purpose. Art purposes, but that didn’t feel adequate, because they would not open the bridge with me underneath, and with an average of thirty-five daily openings for boat traffic, the Fremont Bridge is opened more often than any other drawbridge in the United States, and it is one of the busiest of its kind in the world. Even if I was standing in one of the under-bridge areas marked safe by their absence of yellow warning paint—the unsafe areas being the ones that shifted and went vertical when the bridge opened—the operators wanted me out of there during openings. I had no business under the bridge until I learned I could cross on foot, use my key to enter the other west-side tower, take the stairs to the underbelly, take the catwalk, enter the bridge operator’s tower, and find a bathroom at bridge level. I just had to call first. The bridge supervisor gave me a hard hat, which he told me I was welcome to use for cutesy photo ops, but it was meant for fall protection.

  There were no water monsters under the bridge. I would only ever spot a goddamn Pidgey, Pokémon vermin. Music blared under the bridge to discourage pigeons from gathering. Bells blared to signal openings. No rare monster would live in that water.

  @josebold, July 18, 4:41 pm: You were the pokemon you were looking for all along

  Within weeks of the game’s release, Seattle burn center researchers reported that Pokémon Go kept patients distracted from pain. In July, I played Pokémon late into the night. In July, I kissed Carl while looking into eyes he’d keep open to look beyond me. In July, he asked me, “Do you talk about me with your therapist?”

  This is most of what I remember about that July, a month for gathering and drying food to carry us through winter. It was the month I tried to leave my body because it knew too much about the scarcity to come. I tried to walk the panic out of me: from home to the bridge and back, from work to home, from home through unplanned loops of blocks around the Hill, to downtown, to the waterfront from which this place’s transformation radiated. I walked until my feet and ankles felt broken. I wanted to crack myself and let the dread gush out of the hole.

  In July, Rapunzel’s neon hair, attached to the tower’s exterior below her window, was cut. The light had been going out for months, and once the city determined the office responsible for the art, they took it away for repair.

  I read on witch blogs that head hairs are intuitive conductors. The authors always mentioned Native American hair and said it heightened our Indian senses. Like cat whiskers. Like we were never changed from animal people. My hair is dead and it doesn’t know anything. But something in my body sensed an approaching disturbance then, obscured, a kind of deep hole. Carl said everything was fine, nothing was wrong, fine, nothing wrong, fine, nothing.

  I sat behind a table at the Fremont Sunday Market to answer questions about my project. A tourist asked, “Where can I find the Seattle of the grunge era?”

  “It’s gone,” I said.

  “Which neighborhood is closest though?”

  “There’s none. The grunge era is gone.”

  I didn’t admit that I’d come west looking for it, too. Seattle’s sense of self is built on nostalgia, but yearning for the past too loudly invites reminders that the city changed. Our dearly departed dives were knocked down to make room for badly needed housing.

  On the days I chose not to walk but to instead sit in a hot bus that inched up the regrade-softened Denny Hill during rush hour, I thought, South Lake Union is hell. Amazon’s campus had packed it with people and their cars. The arrival of tens of thousands of tech workers made for a city that grew too rapidly, leading to displacement and gentrification, but long before Amazon existed, the ship canal formed a hard boundary segregating the city: according to historian James N. Gregory, until the late 1960s, African Americans were effectively banned from being in the part of the c
ity north of the ship canal after the end of the workday. “The ship canal was a special kind of boundary, an unmistakable dividing line between the part of Seattle where anyone might live and the part of Seattle that was off-limits to those whose skin was not white.”

  In 2016, north Seattle was 69 percent white, south Seattle 28 percent. Between 1924 and 1948, racial restrictive covenants in property deeds prevented Asian American, African American, and Jewish buyers from purchasing homes in many neighborhoods, especially in north Seattle (in 1948, the Supreme Court ruled this practice unconstitutional). Discriminatory lending practices persisted longer in redlined Seattle. In recent years, historically Black neighborhoods like the Central District have been overtaken by white residents in an onslaught of gentrification due to racial wealth inequality, rising property taxes, predatory lending, and white homebuyers’ demand for housing.

  Sitting on the bus, I thought about the malevolence and how it got here, imported from the white world settlers sought to suck this place into. They made it into what they needed, in large part, through the regrade: scraping, cutting, flattening, earthmoving.

  Before colonization, Lake Union was full of salmon and suckers. After white arrival, it became home to perch, bass, and crappies. On one of my walks home along the lake’s full length, passing the yacht store with PRIVILEGE MARINE lettered in white on the window, reading the metal plaque engraved with the words of Frank Fowler (Duwamish)—“In the thirties, forties, everybody had a canoe, that’s where me and my uncles made a lot of canoes, people wanted them. If you didn’t have a canoe down there, and the fish were running so good, you’d just about die in your heart, to see all that and no canoe”—I touched my phone, opened the Pokémon app, and collected half-dead-looking Magikarp that flopped and struggled against death.