White Magic

by Elissa Washuta

  7-14-18

  We are tired. We get this over with. I can’t tell him he’s tearing me open from the inside, because it’s not like he likes this either.

  Twin Peaks: The Return

  Diane doesn’t accompany Cooper as he walks through the door in the basement of the Great Northern and passes through the Black Lodge, but she rejoins him in the grove outside. “Is it really you?” they ask each other. They kiss, then they drive, quiet. They must drive exactly 430 miles. They kiss again, because it will be different.

  They drive until they reach a motel. While Cooper checks in, Diane sees herself—not from the future or the past, but herself as she is now—standing outside, a doubled body. Cooper seems like two men in one body, hero and doppelgänger-villain collapsed. He’s not exactly the man we got to know over so many screen hours, but is quiet now, not chipper, hardened, thinking things. He tells Diane where to go and what to do. When they fuck, it’s rote. When she’s on top, she covers his face with her hands. She looks at the ceiling. He looks at her, but his face doesn’t register that seeing her means anything.

  7-15-16

  After work, I watch Carl’s tiny music-school students play slightly aged indie rock songs to an audience of parents who may well still be listening to the White Stripes in their headphones at their Amazon jobs. Once the show begins, I try to watch his nervous body on the stage without seeing his fear. It’s me he’s afraid of; it’s as if his stitches are starting to come out, and I’m seeing the batting inside. I want to say I love him just the way he is, but really, I will love him better when he’s perfect.

  We head south to another show at the bar next to the Black Lodge. Carl is on drums. His rhythm’s not quite right, but I don’t say so. His friends Eric and Michael stop by, drunk. I like Michael because he has a drummer’s arms and because he is not my boyfriend; he’s not so tucked inside himself like Carl, the coiled garden snake. I catch a few Pokémon. I look at Michael. Later, in the Volvo, before dropping me off at my apartment, Carl pulls me to him and kisses me like he’s finally roused. He kisses like one of us is going to be executed in the morning. I kiss like I’ve figured out how to suck the venom out of him.

  Twin Peaks: The Return

  Diane has not seen Cooper in some time. Now his evil doppelgänger sits before her; she doesn’t know about the doubling, only that something’s off. His voice is overly deep and mechanical. “Who are you?” she asks her former boss. Once a lover of pie and sender of jaunty missives, he now looks like an aged Glenn Danzig. He says, “I don’t know what you mean, Diane.”

  “Look at me,” she says. He’s not looking away, though. He’s looking at her. What she wants is something else.

  7-15-18

  I show up at karaoke still in a bridesmaid’s dress. Carl agreed to sing “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” with me, but he’s a no-show. When I text, he tells me he’s nearby at a festival, and I should come. I want to cry and flip every table, but instead, I sing the duet with my friend Willie, who had promised to be my singing partner if Carl ghosted. I feel as though I’m vomiting up a fifth of whiskey on the stage. Stop draggin’ my Stop draggin’ my Stop draggin’ my—I’m singing at Willie, and he’s singing back, looking back. My friends would never drag my heart.

  Carl has sent me out into the hexed night alone to find him.

  He forgets to check his phone to tell me how to enter, but once I do, he won’t look at anything but the screen. “You’re being careless with me again,” I tell him. “My heart can’t take this.” He tells me all the reasons he can’t do this, oiled over with self-care jargon. I yell, “I don’t love anybody else!” and realize I need to make it explode out of me only because it’s a lie. I don’t even like him.

  My lie doesn’t work, anyway, because he just doesn’t care. I want to get food. He wants to stay. I want to fight. He wants to find my friend he likes. I let him win.

  Twin Peaks: The Return

  Cooper wakes up in the hotel to find Diane gone. She’s left a note: Richard, when you read this I’ll be gone. Please don’t try to find me, I don’t recognize you anymore. Whatever it was we had together was over. Linda.

  7-16-18

  We’re headed to a diner decorated with airplanes. A car speeds past, going faster than any car I’ve seen in real life. I panic. “They’re just street racing,” Carl says. He directs me while I grip the wheel. He offers to drive, saying, “I used to race all the time.” He seems annoyed by my fear. Like I’m a fool for believing that death, my only certainty, is real.

  At the diner, he takes a photo of something auspicious having to do with a circle. I’m tired of signs. Model airplanes hang from the ceiling, war memorabilia on the walls, but with the red vinyl booths, glass tabletops, and omelet-and-hash menu, it’s just a diner. I can’t get excited. The Duwamish River is maybe five hundred feet away, but I don’t know that. It’s the middle of the night. I’m in a mint-green bridesmaid’s gown.

  I tell him I hate the gown and all other bridesmaid dresses, meant to make a body a decoration. Anyone in gowns built for weddings has to choose which body part they want people to stare at. I would rather disappear. I did not dance. I felt so uneasy with my naked shoulders getting clammy while guests watched me walk the aisle. Just looking at other women’s bare cleavage made me nervous and I had to work not to stare. I tell him all this and ask, “Am I making sense?” What I mean is, Do you see me? The other night, I told him how much I have begun to hate my fatless ass and thick waist. He gave me the Be more in your body talk I should’ve known was coming. What I wanted then was to be told I’m beautiful; what I want now is to be told that I don’t have to be. I want to be excused from this visible, unhappy body, and to still be desired.

  “No,” he says, shoulders tense in his busted fake-leather jacket, “because I’m not uncomfortable with women’s bodies.”

  I tell him that’s not it and he knows it.

  He stares at my chest. He knows my body well: what I hate, what I tolerate. He knows what he’s saying when he says, “Well, that’s just not where I’m looking. I’m not into breasts anymore. I used to be. Now I’m drawn to …” He pauses and looks me in the eye. “Large butts.”

  The grosgrain feels so tight around my ribs that I want to cut off my dress, drop my skin, have nothing to show but bones. I excuse myself, get my change of clothes from the car, and take the dress off in a bathroom stall. I don’t look down at my worthless hips, my pointless breasts, my unabashed belly.

  I want to believe there are two of him: the one who loved me, and this one with the dead face. I can hate the one who is mean to me.

  “We can’t leave it at this,” I tell him when we say good night. He agrees to meet at North Star ten hours later.

  He shows up as the Carl who hates me. I trace the constellations printed on the diner table while he texts.

  I tell him that if we are going to be friends, he needs to stop being careless with me, needs to stop ghosting whenever he meets some woman he wants. He talks about the things he needs to do right now; he thinks being careless with me is self-care. I look up from the tabletop star maps and finally look at him, not into him, and I see a poor conjuror struggling to keep up the illusion that he is worth the price of admission. I see a person so in his body that he can’t get out, sapping his own flesh of vitality: wrinkles setting in, hair full of white. He’s both the man struggling in the water and the man holding him down.

  David Blaine, Mysterious Stranger

  “The older you are, the more layers you’ve built. Magic shatters those barriers … Magic allows people to recapture their childlike wonder and strip away their defenses. Magic makes people vulnerable. That’s when they’re the most beautiful, because they’re no longer hiding and no longer afraid.”

  Twain, The Mysterious Stranger

  “Satan was accustomed to say that our race lived a life of continuous and uninterrupted self-deception. It duped itself from cradle to grave with shams and delusions which it mistook
for realities, and this made its entire life a sham.”

  7-16-18

  I’m in the airport again, begging the universe for signs or, even better, release from this. On the terminal wall, the magician and his assistant are still making a body disappear. Disappearing into the middle of the land again, I tweet with a photo of the empty box and the assistant reaching his hand toward the magician.

  7-17-18

  “I hear you like magic,” a high school student tells me after approaching the bookstore table where I am signing.

  “I do like magic,” I say.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she says.

  “Of course you can.”

  “Why are you looking for magic, and why aren’t some people?”

  Staniforth, Here Is Real Magic

  “The cultural resentment toward magic comes from the sadness found in the space between the universal human longing to believe in magic and the overwhelming evidence all around us that there is no such thing. It’s not that a modern audience doesn’t want magic. It’s that they want it so badly but have already decided it’s not out there, and dislike being told that maybe they were looking in the wrong place.”

  Blaine, Mysterious Stranger

  “All of these effects should astound any audience, but this next one may cause them to think you’re Satan himself.”

  John Granrose, “The Archetype of the Magician”

  “Now it might be the case that the practitioners of witchcraft have been mostly women and the practitioners of magic for entertainment have been mostly men. Given the common negative associations to ‘witchcraft,’ this assumption might be unfair to women so let us leave the question open. Still, this controversy points to the tension between what might be called the two ‘contexts’ for magic: the changing of the world through allegedly magical power and the entertaining of people for the sake of pleasure. In actual cases, of course, it is not always easy to discern which is intended. Shamans and ceremonial magicians can be entertaining. And conjurors do sometimes rise to the level of performing ‘real’ magic.”

  Gurdjieff, quoted by P. I. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous

  “There is an Eastern tale which speaks about a very rich magician who had a great many sheep. But at the same time this magician was very mean. He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence about the pasture where his sheep were grazing. The sheep consequently often wandered into the forest, fell into ravines, and so on, and above all they ran away, for they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and skins and this they did not like.

  “At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotized his sheep and suggested to them first of all that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned, that, on the contrary, it would be very good for them and even pleasant; secondly he suggested that the magician was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them; and in the third place he suggested to them that if anything at all were going to happen to them it was not going to happen just then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about it. Further the magician suggested to his sheep that they were not sheep at all; to some of them he suggested that they were lions, to others that they were eagles, to others that they were men, and to others that they were magicians.

  “And after this all his cares and worries about the sheep came to an end. They never ran away again but quietly awaited the time when the magician would require their flesh and skins.”

  7-23-17

  The movers took my things from the tiny studio apartment where Carl and I fell in love, where he ended it, where I learned to watch the gestures of malingering ghosts. I drove east for five days, a reverse Oregon Trail through deserts and forests and plains, through the atmospheric Black Hills and scorched Badlands, through the gift shop of the Montana Vortex, where I couldn’t wait around for the tour so I never got to feel the “genuine quantum or gravitational anomaly that may re-define the laws of physics and nature … When visitors pass through the ‘Portal’ they can see and feel the power of the vortex and they enter a reality where some physical rules like gravity and perspective are decidedly skewed.”

  Still, I changed; I became more alone than ever, looking for a post office in what I quickly realized was an actual ghost town, holding my piss for hours while I sped past miles of growing grain. I do miss you already, Carl replied a day after I texted him a rest-stop photo of my face. When I woke before dawn in a motel room with a red door and a black-and-white floor, I swore I felt his body move against mine. I left his spirit in that bed.

  After days of sweat and LaCroix, I arrive in Ohio, the place I believe will make me real because it will offer me permanence, what he never would. The sign at the state line says, “Find it here.”

  7-25-18

  Carl texted me yesterday to ask how I’m doing. I told him and asked the same, and he didn’t reply until today. I was going to tell him off, but I am feeling kind of nice because I just had a near-death experience: anaphylaxis from an allergy shot. Now I’m shot through with EpiPen adrenaline, resting with nurses, when he texts that he’s figuring out his life. I tell him about the anaphylaxis. He asks if I’m okay. He says, Stay safe, and I want to throw the phone.

  What I want to tell Carl is that, reclining in this chair, I have proved it to myself: I am being in my body. When my body reacted, I felt only wonder that it could do all this on its own when it had been told it was so stupid: blood rerouted from the limbs and head, waves of uterine cramps, itching soles of feet. I have never been anywhere but here. Carl knows I’m smart inside, and I don’t think he likes it.

  In the reclining chair behind a curtain, I’m googling anaphylaxis. Empty ventricle syndrome, I learn, can happen when people in anaphylaxis suddenly go from reclining to upright. I don’t know what it means, but I know it is deadly. Dying not from a broken heart, but from a drained one. I will not die that way today.

  The Prestige

  BORDEN THE MAGICIAN, TO A LITTLE BOY: Are you watching closely? Never show anyone. They’ll beg you and they’ll flatter you for the secret, but as soon as you give it up, you’ll be nothing to them. You understand? Nothing. The secret impresses no one. The trick you use it for is everything.

  8-2-16

  Last night my building was on fire. Firefighters rushed in through the garage door under my window. I packed my cat in her carrier and tried to remember whether I valued a single thing. I texted Carl to tell him the whole place might burn to the ground. He was busy looking for his passport so he could book a trip to Argentina with the musicians he had just toured with. As I walked away from everything I owned into the hallway, a fireman passed by and told me the fire was out and I could stay. I texted Carl to tell him I was safe. He told me he found his passport.

  Does he love me anymore? Not today, anyway. I’m behind my building doing a love spell, cutting three circles from construction paper, writing my desires for a relationship on them, and burying them in the plot of an almost-garden next to my parking space. Then I carve MARRIAGE, 3 YEARS onto a candle, anoint it, pray with it, and burn it to the end. Sometimes he and I have what I want: love, respect, passion, kindness, safety, joy, honesty, fidelity.

  But I’ve been watching closely while the void eats him. On the couch, I’ve been asking him to tell me what he’s thinking, but he’ll just say things or nothing or I don’t remember while he drinks hard cider and we watch Bob Ross showing us, stroke by stroke, how to make a bunch of dots and lines into the illusion of a world. When we’re apart, Carl texts me emojis instead of words, long nonsensical strings, single crystal balls in response to my questions.

  My magic person is gone, and this one remains: Carl never looking in my eyes, Carl drunk, Carl looking out the window while hand-feeding his dick to my vagina. Carl’s mail on the coffee table, a postcard in Spanish, which he doesn’t know I can read a little. Carl gone to buy another used car, another guitar, another
amp. Carl asleep.

  “I see myself acting like my father with you,” he told me the other day while I watched him eat the dinner I’d cooked him. “I don’t like it.”

  The building was on fire. I was on my couch. He was looking for his passport. And now the soil in my hands is hot and Carl is lying to me.

  8-2-17

  I am in my little house, alone except for the internet, which I know will explain everything to me if I google hard enough. There is nothing else for me, craven beast in a strange land, sweating into the couch in a dim and ancient brick room with its small windows covered. I take every Have You Found Your Twin Flame? quiz, read every list of twin flame signs. Some of them fit, like that we keep leaving each other and feel pulled back; that we learn important life lessons from our relationship; that we were immediately attracted to each other and had a strong sense of recognition of each other; that we are very sensitive to each other’s energy.

  The internet says you’re supposed to just know in your heart, but also says it’s possible to meet a person who feels like a twin flame, pulled into life with a bundle of synchronicities and magic and feelings of fate, until the lights go out. I find long lists of counterfeit twin flame characteristics: constant doubt that the bond is real, emotional unavailability, infidelity, codependence, dishonesty.

  With nobody to love and no answers anywhere, I resume watching Twin Peaks: The Return. I seek out mystic symbols in every shot. I will find something there.