White Magic

by Elissa Washuta

  Late in season two, Cooper goes into the Black Lodge after Annie, the woman he loves a little bit, who has been kidnapped. “An opening to a gateway,” he says before slipping through a red curtain that appears in a grove of trees.

  Love opens the door to the White Lodge. Fear opens the door to the Black Lodge. If a soul does not approach with perfect courage, the Black Lodge will obliterate it.

  1-13-17

  They call this place the Black Lodge. Maybe it’s because we’re all in black Vans, black jeans, black shrouds, black leather jackets with silver spikes. My friend Theresa and I wear identical black boots, black leggings, and shapeless black jersey dresses. I always need a twin. In the Black Lodge, the bathroom has no door, so I use the one at the adjoining bar.

  Maybe they call this place the Black Lodge because we are in Seattle, where we can touch the real world that hosted David Lynch’s fictional one. In a performing hall six-tenths of a mile from the Black Lodge, the Roadhouse interior scenes were filmed.

  Out on the sidewalk, we shiver far beneath the hot, roaring freeway. Carl’s roommate Michael comes out from the bar next door. He’s been drumming.

  He and I were on this block together last year, two doors down, where Carl was playing a show. From the beginning of my relationship with Carl, Michael was a nice mystery: he never seemed to be at the house, there were almost no traces of him online, and even Carl seemed to know almost nothing about him. I only ever saw him at shows. Not long before Carl broke up with me, on a bar patio, I held his hand while I watched Michael’s arms, and later, Carl said, “Sometimes, I feel like when I’m holding your hand, you’re not holding it back.” I can only hold so many things at a time, and that’s true for Carl, too, but he thought it was okay when he was the one dreaming about someone else’s body.

  Tonight, no Carl, only Michael. We talk. I learn nothing but his sun sign, Leo. Later, when I see him walking away with a drum in his arms, I know I’ll never see him again. If a person doesn’t leave themselves all over the internet, how real can they be?

  1-22-18

  Men refuse to be permanent for me, so I need to buy a house, and it has to be a hundred years old, a mature being who knows how to stick around. I choose a neighborhood full of old houses and have dinner at one of its taverns. While I’m eating, a woman approaches. “Hiiiiii!” she says. She looks just like me, down to the glasses, but she’s about twenty years older. “Hi,” I say. She sets her notebook on the bar and walks away. I feel like I’m supposed to open it, but instead, I pay and leave.

  1-27-18

  The conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, known as the great conjunction, happens every twenty years. It’s seen as an omen. The Star of Bethlehem may have been a great conjunction. Conjunctions are said to kill sitting presidents. Transiting Jupiter also makes conjunctions to Saturn in a natal chart every twenty years. Today, in my own chart, that conjunction is exact. What is it going to kill?

  Twin Peaks

  We know fear opens the door of the Black Lodge. We learn from a puzzle-as-petroglyph marked on the Owl Cave that during the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, a portal opens up in Glastonbury Grove, red curtains appear, and people can step through into the waiting room.

  2-14-18

  In the airport, I beg the universe and the internet for signs. I’m going home to Ohio after seeing Carl in Seattle during a work trip. His band, whose songs and aesthetic are Twin Peaks–derived, played a show where I met the girlfriend he doesn’t want to talk about. Tomorrow, an eclipse will come. Something will arrive or something will leave. On Twitter, I see a page from the book Dead Horse by Niina Pollari: “Without you / The killing night comes down / Like a horse from heaven”; I want to be the something that leaves. I sit on the airport floor, propped up dead among the living and their bags of things. “If you say you love me / I will open my mouth and you can live in it.” On the terminal wall, a mural-flat magician and his assistant make a body disappear.

  2-21-18

  Tonight in Ohio, I’m alone at a charming theater to see a magician. Nate Staniforth begins his show standing at the edge of the stage, scanning the crowd, and when he makes eye contact with me, I know I’m going to be part of the act.

  “A moment will come where you just don’t know what to think about anything anymore,” he says. He pulls threaded needles from his mouth, lights a dollar bill on fire and brings it back to form, and says illusions work on us because we’re misremembering the last four minutes. He says, “There’s a world of difference between being fooled by something and being genuinely amazed.”

  He’s given us index cards. For the finale, he asks us to write down a name—someone we really care about. CARL, I write. The magician instructs us to fold the cards, collects them in a grocery bag, and selects an assistant from the crowd. She draws a card, or does he? I forget to watch closely. He asks some of us to stand, and then one by one, directs people to sit until I am standing alone, hot, organs pulsing, my nervy limbs quivering, and the magician approaches.

  Close your eyes, he says. His soft voice in the darkness sounds like it’s coming from inside my own head. Imagine the person. Imagine them sitting beside you. Imagine what they’re wearing. I’m imagining Carl dressed identically to me, in black jeans and a flannel.

  Imagine the person standing up, the magician says. Imagine them walking down the aisle toward me, and saying …

  My name is Carl.

  I open my eyes and scream.

  The magician is right in front of me, smiling, really looking at me. It’s been a while since anybody looked into my eyes the way I try to see into everybody else’s. He hands me my card. CARL, it says.

  Alone in my car after the show, I feel the magic pent up in my bones and tissues. There is no one I can explain this to. The magic can be fake and it can be real. It can. Otherwise I cannot live in this world.

  Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger

  “No apparitions, no incantations, no thunder. That settled it. This was witchcraft. And not only that, but of a new kind—a kind never dreamed of before. It was a prodigious power, an illustrious power; he resolved to discover its secret.”

  3-22-18

  Eliza, a grad student I advise, sits across my desk with a list of questions. She asks about independent study. She asks about class. She pauses, looks into my eyes, and asks, “Did you buy a house?” This is a question on her list. She dreamed of a house full of doors that I wouldn’t allow anyone to open. “Not yet, but I’m closing soon,” I say. In one week, I will turn the key in the lock of the front door of the house I own, step across the threshold, and lock the door behind me. I will finally feel safe.

  Amanda Linette Meder, “Doorways to the Other Side: Am I a Portal? Is My House a Portal?”

  “A portal is a doorway, a gateway from one place to another place. It’s a location where energy, matter, people and Spirits can transfer between one side and another side. It’s a crack in the wall or a place with a large funnel of energy coming in.”

  4-21-18

  When Jupiter conjuncts Saturn, two more conjunctions will follow: Jupiter (the faster-moving planet) spends about half the year retrograde, during which time it backtracks through the zodiac before turning direct and retracing its steps. This means that it will pass over Saturn three times. My second conjunction happens today.

  4-25-16

  Last night, my Tinder date asked me, “Do you like my white cock?” after he told me the ways he was planning to hold me down and fuck me. I’m planning to delete Tinder after I go on one last date, with this curly-haired, bespectacled hipster who looks like the typical softboy who matches with me three times and never wants to meet up. But this one does. His name is Carl. His bio is empty. His job is Guitarist at Earth. He likes the photo of me dressed up as the Log Lady, with a thick sweater, red-framed glasses, cradling a fireplace log.

  We meet at Montana Bar, a dark, scrawled-over place. Then we go to the food place around the corner. Then another bar. I’m sober but
I feel drunk, losing track of time, as if I’ve been shot down a pneumatic tube from eight to midnight. As if I’ve met someone I loved in another lifetime, and my mind says safe when it means familiar.

  Twin Peaks: The Return

  Cooper goes through a portal that takes him across a time wrinkle. He finds Laura in the woods, moving between her anguished goodbye to her beloved and the meeting that will kill her. He can disrupt the timeline now.

  “Who are you?” Laura asks the special agent. “Right. I’ve seen you in a dream. In a dream. Where are we going?”

  Cooper says, “We’re going home.”

  He takes her by the hand and leads her through the woods. We hear an electrical sound, and just like that, in front of our eyes, she disappears.

  4-25-18

  Carl is visiting family in West Virginia. Before traveling east, he asked if he could come up to see my house. He thinks the drive will take an hour; it takes three and a half. I’m almost surprised to see him at my door in this city that’s mine and not his, where I’ve never smoked a cigarette or gotten drunk. “I’m in love with your house,” he keeps saying. We go out for ice cream, and I Instagram a photo of us in our black beanies and dark plaid flannels. We go to the thirty-two-room bookstore, where I point out the love languages book. “Remember when your therapist had us do that?” I ask. “And it didn’t help? So my therapist said we should try enneagrams?” He remembers; he reminds me that enneagrams are a concept from Gurdjieff, the mystic whose work he studied in a group that has always sounded cult-adjacent to me. We go to a bar where he tells me he was born a swindler, raised a liar, and can’t stop cheating on women. This seems to be why he’s here: he’s cheated on his girlfriend and he wants me to make him feel better. I’m not in the mood.

  I assign him to the guest bedroom. He plays on his phone with the door open and the light on while I wipe off my makeup. My loins have decided he’s dead to them. I close my door.

  4-26-16

  We don’t have to go home, but we can’t stay here, in this thick block of a bar booth, so we walk to my apartment building and I show him the old Otis elevator. I draw the dingy golden cage closed and we ascend, kissing in the corner of the old box.

  In my bed at dawn, Carl asks, “Where have you been? Where were you?”

  4-26-18

  He’s learned a new scrambled-egg cooking technique, so I let him make them for us both. I don’t think the new method is any good. When he leaves and I lock the door behind him, the house sighs. We are alone again.

  4-29-18

  I shower while thinking, If I never see him again, that would be okay. I got my closure. When I towel off, my arm knocks my labradorite necklace from the vanity to the floor. I bought it after Carl broke up with me, at the suggestion of a psychic who told me to protect my heart. I’ve worn it nearly every day since. The fall splits the stone in two. I take this to signify an ending, but I put it in my jewelry cabinet, not ready to discard it.

  LATE APRIL OR EARLY MAY 2016

  New at each other, we are together every untied minute. Tonight, he opens the door and stands before me as a dim shape against lamplit white walls. The image of his V-necked clavicles is seared into me like the small vision hole burned into the retina of someone who stares into the solar eclipse. “Wow,” he whispers, standing still in the doorway. “You weren’t here. And now you’re here.”

  I look into his eyes, which are 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’s right. There, alone, then here, poised at the threshold between lawn and living room.

  In his bed, I like my hands on his compact rib cage. By his smell—a little musky, inching toward ripe—I know he’s flesh, not ghost. When I tell him about my PTSD, he asks, “What are your triggers?” My psychiatrist said ten years without a diagnosis and proper treatment let my triggers spread like toxic mold. A partner vacillating between warmth and coolness can set me off. He holds me and thanks me for telling him. Because I am a fool, I have faith he’ll use what I’ve told him to love me better.

  5-10-18

  I found a snake in my house. It’s thinner than a finger, and I dare myself to pick it up by its tail, but I’m not a snake handler. When I approach, it slithers away; when I touch it with a gloved hand, it sticks out its tiny tongue and I scream. I catch it in a glass and carry it outside. We are both upset. It watches me pull weeds for a while. I will make a personality for the snake if I want to. Nobody can stop me. The snake and I love each other but we are afraid. I take my eyes off him for a minute and he’s gone.

  5-15-16

  For a week, I’ve been in the desert, worried Carl will find someone else while I’m gone. I can hardly think about anything but his heart emojis and compact bones. He meets me at the airport with a bouquet of daisies. He must love me. I am keeping track, tallying gestures. In my apartment, I find a stove burner I never use turned on to high. Here I’m trying to be in heaven, and some ghost wants to make it a hell.

  5-17-17

  I owe Carl an apology, because even though he has treated me like a reluctantly received houseplant, I tried to hurt him deep in his heart and need to resolve my guilt before I move. Two months ago, he texted me out of nowhere, telling me I was on his mind, asking how I was doing. I told him I was moving and I reminded him of all the rotten things he’d done to me. He said he was sorry, but I kept going. I didn’t want his accountability; I wanted his pain. The apology I emailed him was for myself, so I would think I was a good person, or maybe I wanted something else, because now we are meeting at a taco place on Capitol Hill. We are far apart inside the house-sized booth. He presses his hands into the lacquered tabletop and stares at his fingers. He has some words under his tongue. I don’t love him anymore.

  5-18-18

  He texts to ask whether I’m coming home. I am, but I don’t care to tell him so. Doesn’t he know this is over?

  5-20-16

  I watch Carl onstage, working his guitar like a scalpel to my heart. After, at the bar, we admire a painting of a ship on black velvet and he says we should have our portrait painted on black velvet for our wedding invitations. When we fall asleep hours later, his thigh between mine, his amps stacked around my bed in my tiny studio, he says, “This is the best day of my whole life.” I have what I needed those nights when, as a preteen trying to reach out of the haunted forest, I listened to Delilah reading love song dedications on the radio, hoping for a message that I would be loved. This is what I thought it would feel like: a breakage reversed.

  Nate Staniforth, Here Is Real Magic

  “Like a writer of fiction, a magician does everything possible to make an illusion feel real in the moment.”

  5-20-18

  People caution me against love spells because I am powerful. I could make a mess. But they don’t understand how lonely I am. I must be hexed: every flirtation fails. I could curse every married person who says I should be happy to be single, but instead, I go to a magic megastore and buy dried roots advertised as sex spell ingredients. I buy two person-shaped candles. I put the roots in my bra and the candles on my mantel. I anoint them with oil, scratch TRUE LOVE into the base of one and ELISSA into the base of the other, and I set them on fire.

  5-21-16

  We sit on the same side of a booth at the pizza place, staring into each other’s eyes for five minutes. Carl’s eyes are like tunnels, his skull less like a brain cabinet and more like a portal. My eyes reach in and it’s like the first time I ever saw the Milky Way out on a mountain, unpolluted by light. Being seen makes my body electric. It has been a year since I began learning to feel. Everything is pins and needles, my spirit waking up.

  5-21-17

  To mark the hundredth year since the ship canal’s grand opening, Coast Salish canoe families have gathered to paddle from Lake Washington to Puget Sound. I’ve shown up at the lake to visit them, and the C
owlitz Canoe Family invites me to accompany them in the support boat. I haven’t been on a boat in these waters since Henry and I would travel from Lake Washington to Lake Union, and these memories assert themselves more than my research, more than my images of the water from above. But we keep going beyond where Henry would turn around, passing under the Fremont Bridge, where I see my tower from the water I stared into last summer. We stop in the locks, then charge through bay waters to meet the canoes at Golden Gardens. They’re mostly empty when we approach. “How can you leave your land?” my friend asked when I told him I’m moving to Ohio. I ask myself this over and over. The answer is in the images: in my brain there will always be a row of canoes against sand and evergreens, a portal to the place and the self I had to leave.

  Franck Boulègue, Twin Peaks: Unwrapping the Plastic

  At the end of the original series, Cooper meets his doppelgänger in the Black Lodge. According to Franck Boulègue, this is “his own Shadow, at the heart of his personal unconscious. This ‘double’ is an independent ‘twin’, a menacing inner alterity endangering the stability of his personal identity … Unable to defeat his inner demons, Cooper ends up being swallowed up by the Black Lodge that releases his mirror image, i.e. himself, but possessed by some of the negative aspects of the collective unconscious … The conscious, positive aspects of his personality are kept a prisoner of the Lodges.”

  5-23-16

  “I saw you,” says a woman at a recovery meeting. “I saw you driving your car.” This morning, she says, at the end of Carl’s block. But I wasn’t there. She’s sure, though. It was me, she’s certain. “It must’ve been my doppelgänger,” I say.

  5-23-17

  On the way to a reading in Eastern Washington, over the pass, I think about stopping at Twede’s, the filming location for the Double R Diner in Twin Peaks. I haven’t been back since I went with Henry during my golden birthday trip. I could stop at Snoqualmie Falls, shown in Twin Peaks in establishing shots for the lodge; I used to visit when my nighttime panic attacks needed to be broken by the sound of falling river water. Today, I have someplace to be. I do make a bathroom stop at Snoqualmie Pass, where my body is small next to the bright white peaks.