White Magic
Page 29
“I wonder what that feels like,” I say.
He says, “Some relationships—when you see the person, you get right to the truth of things.”
Carl is a kind of mentalist, building illusions that bend my thoughts. He knows what I want is a dissolution of the barrier between minds. But I don’t believe in real magic anymore. I know it’s all tricks.
He says things are hard. He hasn’t been happy. He asks, “Did you ever cast a spell on me?”
If I like to watch his discomfort, does it mean I don’t love him?
Onstage, he always gives the other musicians focused attention he rarely shows to anything offstage. I watch him closely. Every so often, he looks out at me, and I wonder whether maybe he is happy to see me.
Partway through the show, a couple of guys want to dance with me. I tell them no. They ask again, and then they’re not asking, grabbing my arm and pulling. I yank my arm back and tell them no again, and they move away. When the show ends and the crowd begins to shift toward the doors, the men break against the flow and move toward me. I bolt across the room, down the stairs, and into the green room, where I hide while the band packs up. I tell Carl what happened and he sits with me. When they’re ready to go to their hotel, I expect Carl to leave with them, but he wants to stay with me.
We lie in my bed and I stroke his face. “I’m sorry I’m being weird,” he says, and I realize he’s trying to tell me that he doesn’t want to touch, so I pull my hand back. He sleeps. I don’t. I’m watching him and trying to figure out whether I love him. I need to know. He hurts my heart, but he would never hurt my body, which I can’t take for granted. I’m safe, I’m safe, I’m safe, I remind myself all night while he sleeps.
10-14-17
They’re going north and I’m going south. First, I’m going to the cemetery where the magician is buried. We’ve hugged goodbye. While I’m standing over the magician’s buried body, Carl calls. He wants to know where I am, and I tell him I’m at a cemetery. “Is it … good?” he asks.
“I’m visiting the graves of a magician and his sister.”
“Do you study this magician?”
“Sort of.”
He asks if there’s a jacket in my back seat. They’re too far away to turn back, so he wants me to mail it to his house. I don’t even have to think about it: I know, as soon as I hold the battered vinyl, that I’m going to push a few of my long hairs deep into the lining’s gashes.
10-14-18
I send Billy a photo of myself standing sideways and flexing my glutes. I don’t have a butt, but this is the best I can do. I tell him to please say something nice. Dude your legs look hella good is the reply. I tell him he can’t treat me like this. He doesn’t answer. Twitter says he’s liked a tweet from @sosadtoday: i liked you better when you were imaginary.
10-22-18
I dream about Billy in a doorway, lit from behind like a prayer card Jesus. He dreams he’s watching me walk through a door and look at him. Soon after we wake up in separate places, he sends me an article: “A scientific mission into the secret ocean lair of California’s great white sharks has provided tantalizing clues into a vexing mystery—why the fearsome predators spend winter and spring in what has long appeared to be an empty void in the deep sea.”
I get on a plane, and just like that, six hours later, I’m driving in the dark to his mom’s house on a big parcel of scorched land, where we’ll be staying for the week so we have more space. When I arrive, he hugs me, then kisses me on the cheek as an afterthought. I don’t touch my hand to his heavy, unwashed hair, and I don’t feel the bristles of his unshaven spots of face. He has filled the fridge with all the things he knows I like. It must have taken everything he had, I tell myself, and that is why he will have barely anything left for me when we sit on the couch and watch people on TV making dream houses.
10-24-18
While Billy goes to work, I spend the days alone with horses and a dog, uncomfortable in a reality I spent the summer imagining, building the world in my mind image by image: dogs lazing on the covered porch, horses wandering up and down the pasture, dry yard landscaped without grass. Now, I sit on the porch, trying to write about magic, and the hot quiet feels eerie, like I’m in the opening scene of a Western, waiting at the ranch for the narrative menace to show up and take off its hat. He’d said the horses were his family’s, but they belong to the neighbors, and he’s calling them different names than he gave when he sent me their pictures this summer. Why would anybody lie about a horse?
In the texted photos, I couldn’t hear the sounds of swarming hummingbirds in the pink bushes. I couldn’t see beyond the fence, where the horses’ tails swing in tandem and then don’t. I couldn’t feel the air turning from cool to scorching and back so fast it feels like a man. I tweet, This morning I watched a long line of big vultures walk down a hill toward me, each one clambering over a metal gate. Happy Scorpio season. I listen for the sounds of Billy coming back, even though it won’t happen for hours. I am like a pet. Just wanting his touch. When Billy returns, he rubs the dog all over his ancient body, and the dog looks at me like he knows how much I want this love, but Billy doesn’t have enough for me and the dogs and the Instagram women he will heart all night.
10-26-18
I wake up before him and walk outside. Across the field, a jackrabbit stands in the scorched gold grass, looking like an omen. When he wakes up, I tell him, but a jackrabbit is nothing to him.
Weeks ago, he asked if we could go to a corn maze, one of the world’s largest. But once we’re there, I can’t see why he wanted to. He’s sweaty and surly, not talking much. He’s mad at someone and wants to fight him. He probably won’t. Looking into the menacing rows of tall, secret-keeping corn, I can hardly tell a path from a wall. I let him walk ahead and make all the choices. I watch his long brown hair against his hard back, which I hope I will touch again someday. I can see nothing but high walls of corn, clear sky, and the vexed sun. The ground is hard-packed, useless dust. I feel like I’m in a movie, because how else could I be so far from my house, everything I recognize, anyone who loves me?
10-27-18
He kisses me goodbye lightly in the dark and says he’ll see me in a month. I fly home crying. When I get home, I text that I’ve landed. He calls me to break up with me. He says he’s a liar, a thief, and a cheat. “Did you cheat on me?” I ask, and he says, “No.” I say I didn’t think he did, but I’m lying. He says he needs time alone. He says he doesn’t know what’s going to happen—he won’t rule out that we could be together again.
He wanted fantasy, maybe, his life turned into the autofiction he loves, the details changed a little for the sake of the story. But I write nonfiction. I want it real. And I want, to my constant detriment, to work other people like I work an essay, conjuring up meaning where there was none.
11-5-18
Twitter says it’s cuffing season. My yard is full of dead leaves. The air outside feels startled, like it didn’t know the hot wetness was going to leave it, and it smells like other people’s fires. Billy has never been in my house, but I think of him everywhere: at the kitchen counter, where I was standing when we first texted; at the bathroom mirror, where I took a photo meant to be a thirst trap for him; on the couch, where I sat and looked at our astrological synastry; in the bedroom, where I stood before the tall mirror and tried to bend my body into the shape I thought he wanted. But I have felt his spirit begin to vacate.
My mind still reaches for the signs I collected. Those uncanny synchronicities seemed to be telling me he was my perfect love. But maybe they were just pulling me into the suffering that would make me change.
11-6-18
C. G. JUNG FOUNDATION @cgjungny
“There are no fixed symbolic meanings … Every symbol has more than one meaning.”
—Carl Gustav Jung
12:05 PM–6 Nov 2018
11-7-18
Months ago, I bought a ticket to Fleetwood Mac’s Columbus show. It seemed like
a moment that could close the circle: at the end of the documentary Destiny Rules, Stevie and Lindsey hold hands as they step onto a stage that, it turns out, was in Columbus, Ohio. Now Lindsey has been kicked out of the band, at Stevie’s insistence, and she will perform with friends and associates who haven’t, as far as I know, choked her. I have built up the event for months: maybe my book will end here as I am transformed by the conflation of the real world and the video worlds in which Stevie and Lindsey stare into each other onstage during “Silver Springs.”
My seat is close, but not close enough that Stevie looks like anything but a distant, high-definition video image, moving below a massive screen that shows her close-up face and cloth-draped form. They’ve done this so many times. The moves are rote. Without surprise, the act doesn’t feel real.
11-11-12
SEATTLE CRAIGSLIST > SEATTLE > PERSONALS > MISSED CONNECTIONS
You were me from the future, on the bus, wearing a medical mask - w4w - 27 (Madison Park)
I was on the 11 bus to Madison Park. You were disembarking from the back door, wearing a beige wool cape and a medical mask. You had your hair pulled back and carried a book under your arm. I had long brown hair and the same glasses as you, the ones that Buddy Holly wore a thousand years ago and hipsters wear now. I was hung over. You looked just like me, but older, and I know that you were me, from the future, by how freaked out you looked to see me. Please contact. I have some questions.
· Location: Madison Park
· it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
11-12-12
xxxxxxx@gmail.com via craigslist.org
Mon, Nov 12, 2012, 11:28 PM
I hope she responds to you, or you run into each other again.
I would take the same bus, at the same time, on the same day for a while.
Or again next month on the same day and time.
11-13-10
I wake up in the middle of the night with Henry’s fingers pinching my nose, his palm over my mouth, and his eyes like twin occulted suns staring down at my smothered face. He releases me, and I go to the guest room to sleep, but I can’t. So I leave. I don’t remember the next week. The next four years.
11-14-18
The Seattle Times reports today, “Urban Indian Health Institute identified 506 cases in cities across the country of missing or murdered Native American women and girls. Seattle had the most cases.” On Twitter, Native women say if they go missing, they want their loved ones to assume they’ve been murdered, because they wouldn’t disappear on their own. I don’t know whether I would. There’s nothing I do on my own. The men are with me forever.
11-16-18
I’m so bored I could die, like a lady once said on Sex and the City before falling to her death, so I reinstall Tinder. I match with a magician who wants to meet at a bar called Jack’s, where the walls are covered in mirrored beer signs adorned with horses or women. The magician smells like he’s stamped out cigarettes on the back of his tongue. He shows me a card trick and keeps finding ways to bring up Transcendental Meditation. I agree to go to his house to “watch TV” because I’m so bored I could die. I want another trick. I want to feel wonder, but I feel nothing: not a desire butterfly uncocooning, not the creep of terror spreading in my gut, just the non-feeling of a calcified soul that can’t sense. He turns the heat up high and tells me I can take off my coat, but I’m chilled to the bone. Every time he gets up and returns to the couch, he sits closer to my pressed-together legs. What can we talk about? I need to keep him talking so he won’t put his mouth on mine in the silence. I talk about the Twin Peaks art on his wall, and the Twin Peaks books on his shelf, and he explains the show to me. He walks away to pour another drink when I tell him I’m trying to play with time like David Lynch did in The Return, and to play with echoed imagery like he did in the first two seasons, except I’m doing it in a book, and I know I’ll never really be allowed to because I’m not a man.
The magician wants to talk about Fleetwood Mac and how they’re nothing without Lindsey, who, he agrees, is “an asshole” (I said “an abuser”), but “you’ve gotta separate the artist from the art.” He has Lindsey’s albums on vinyl. He has a charred sage bundle in an ashtray. He has a bedroom decorated like the Black Lodge, he tells me, and when he lights a stick of palo santo and waves it between me and the TV playing Beavis and Butt-Head, I tell him I’m tired and I’m going home. He doesn’t protest. He, or someone else hiding behind a caller ID block, prank calls me later, making the slapping skin-on-skin sounds of hard sex. The magician texts ten minutes later, Hope you had fun.
11-19-18
Tweet, source now unknown, image saved to iPhone photos:
Q: What do David Lynch & your ex have in common?
A: Neither of them owe you closure.
11-22-10
GChat logs:
12:34 PM
ME: hey
12:40 PM
HENRY: hey
12:41 PM
ME: how are you doing?
HENRY: so so
ME: did you get to go snowboarding this weekend?
12:42 PM
HENRY: on satruday
ME: cool
ME: is something wrong?
12:43 PM
HENRY: not really
ME: ah
12:44 PM
ME: i kind of feel like that too
12:45 PM
ME: do you want to hang out later?
HENRY: no
ME: oh …
ME: i hope i didn’t do anything …
12:46 PM
HENRY: ok
12:47 PM
ME: did i? i don’t want to be a pest about it but i’d like to know if i upset you
12:48 PM
HENRY: yes, I am upset with you
ME: why?
12:49 PM
HENRY: we were supposed to hang out, you don’t show up, and then don’t call me for a week
12:50 PM
ME: what? when were we supposed to hang out? the last time i talked to you, you said you were busy doing homework and were behind on it, so i figured i’d leave you alone till you were free
HENRY: last Sunday
12:51 PM
ME: i feel like i’m losing my mind … what was happening last sunday?
12:52 PM
ME: i saw you last sunday, i slept over saturday night
12:56 PM
HENRY: then you left
HENRY: and said you were coming back later
12:58 PM
ME: i don’t remember saying that at all … but i barely remember leaving … i remember being embarassed for snoring so loud and going to sleep in the other room … i’m really sorry, i just don’t even remember saying that i’d be back later
12:59 PM
HENRY: ok
1:02 PM
ME: and like i said, i didn’t call you because you said you were behind on homework, and then fri/sat i was at hugo house and then a gala. again, i’m really sorry, i didn’t mean to ditch you on sunday, i wish you’d have called to see when i was coming over. i hope you’ll forgive me because i really absolutely did not mean to ditch you and then space for a week. all week i wanted to see you. so that’s all, i’m sorry.
1:04 PM
HENRY: whatever
HENRY: that is just the tip of the iceberg anyways
1:05 PM
ME: why? what’s the rest?
1:08 PM
HENRY: basically you’ve become exteremly self absorbed and hypocrictal over the last 3 months
ME: i know
HENRY: and not all the pleasent to deal with
ME: i know
ME: what am i hypocritcal about?
HENRY: eating and exercising
1:09 PM
ME: i just ask you about it because when you’re paleo and going to crossfit i look up to you
ME: if that’s what you mean
1:10 PM
ME: i’m n
ot being judgmental at all, i’m just curious
HENRY: no
HENRY: i mean
HENRY: all you say is you want to eat good food
HENRY: then all you do is eat cupcakes
HENRY: and then complain about it
1:11 PM
ME: i’ve been primal for 3 days … it’s not much but i’m trying to take it one day at a time
HENRY: cool
1:14 PM
ME: while you were in NY i had the worst mood episode ive had in a long time. and it was convenient timing because i didn’t want you to have to see it. but i’m still not completely right and i’m having a really hard time getting healthy while i’m still depressed. i know it’s not good for you to be around me when i’m depressed. but i’m working on getting better. actually doing stuff to try to get stable again. i can’t just crawl into a hole for months while i do it. i’m sure i’m not fun to be around and i’m really sorry for that. and i appreciate that you put up with me.
1:16 PM
HENRY: ok
1:21 PM
ME: i think i’d be a lot easier to deal with if i weren’t trying to pretend i’m totally ok all the time, but i feel like that’s what i have to do
1:22 PM
HENRY: i guess
1:23 PM
HENRY: you can’t keep getting a free pass beacuse you are in a bad mood
HENRY: doesn’t work that way
ME: i know
1:24 PM
ME: but i feel like things might be better if i felt like i didn’t have to attempt to hide it from you