Mistification

by Kaaron Warren

  "I understand," Marvo said. The man thought he understood hunger. He wondered if the charity director had tins of food under his bed, packets of biscuits hidden around the house.

  Marvo went home to Andra. She had taken lovers while he was away but he didn't mind. They had made love once, and that was enough for him.

  "What else have you been doing while I was gone?" he asked.

  Andra healed; she learnt more each day about the plants and stones, the lives, the human body.

  The act of healing was like that of magic. There were those who were true, who practised the healing or the magic because they had to. Then there were those who desired the talent without having the gift. They studied and worked, they learnt from watching, they listened and they became adept.

  And there were those who had some true gift, yet used it for profit and cared little for the people they faked service to.

  Andra and Marvo both despised these abusers. Andra in particular spent time exposing them as fakes.

  She was scarred on her shoulders, across her throat; wounds inflicted because of a doctor she trusted. There was a strain of magic which met healing. Superstitious people sought navel cords as luck and health. Many people had no real access, so the doctor Andra trusted had a large market.

  He made a fortune selling the navel cords of the children he delivered.

  He did not believe in the magic he was selling. This was very dangerous – as Marvo knew well. Without belief, magic was weakened. Andra told Marvo the story and he wished he'd been there to help her.

  Caul Cure

  I was seduced by his soft voice, his gentle hands, his words. He spoke so sweetly as he cut me, as he practised his art. He was supposed to soothe my sore limbs.

  He was murdered by a man who has lost his child because of the failed magic.

  They had a child who ached in head and belly. They were advised by this doctor that drugs wouldn't help, and true natural products could cause more bad than good, he said.

  He told them he had a new cure, which had not been tested. He knew it was safe though. He knew it worked for aches in head and belly. It was new, but it was ancient. Since the beginning of time, he said, this cure had been used. He wanted them to think about it over the weekend, and come back to him on Monday. He was the sole supplier, because he was willing to take risks with the law if it meant a life would be saved. He inspired them; they believed him. Over the weekend, the child cried and complained. By Sunday evening, they were ready to trust the doctor completely.

  It isn't cheap, he told them once they had accepted his plan.

  They agreed to pay whatever it cost.

  He provided them with a caul, tied in a ring, which their child had as its talisman.

  This fake magic, which the doctor did not believe in, did not work. While they were waiting for it to cure their child, the cancer took hold.

  The father, not caring what happened to him, took the doctor's life. I was there. I tried to save the doctor, threw myself on the father's knife, used my body to shield the doctor.

  "Please don't," the father said to me. I saw some truth in his eyes but I couldn't leave him to kill. He threw me off and killed the doctor as I sank to the floor.

  The father carried me home after the killing. He didn't want to avoid punishment; he wanted to save me from involvement.

  #

  Marvo sent such a mist to the body of the doctor it appeared he had died of a heart attack. Marvo understood that the father had killed for his own sake as well as his baby's. He knew that becoming a parent does not take away a person's own emotions and needs; they do not become mere ciphers for their child's existence.

  Andra taught Marvo about the use of nature in healing.

  Homoeopathic magic breeds homoeopathic medicine (science). Each cure was the image of the disease.24

  Where does the need to heal come from? Why some and not others? Why this person and not that? She had healed a woman with a limp, taken the limp and given it to a cat. Watched the woman slink away, hips rolling gently and sweetly.

  Andra wondered why she was so blessed and cursed with the power to heal.

  Marvo was fascinated. When he saw the cure for rheumatism, he remembered his grandmother's story about the old age trick and he finally understood her message.

  She was his mother. His grandmother was really his mother.

  Marvo gave Andra a story he had heard on is travels. Andra settled into his tone, his form of loving.

  An Early Doctor

  I know of a woman from a long time ago. She was born to a family of wealth, yet as a woman she would never own wealth herself. All her life she was dressed in the finest cloth; servants would begin weaving the next piece as she took the first. Once that became damaged it would be given to the girl belonging to the next family, who would pass her cloth to the next. The rich girl would see the cloth she had worn wrapped in tatters around the last girl, the daughter of an old widow woman without skills or talent. The poor daughter would never discard a piece of cloth. She would wrap them around her legs, wrists, plait them in her hair. She carried years of the rich girl's clothing on her body.

  It was illegal in this village for a woman to weave or spin during pregnancy. If she did her child would live to be hanged by a hempen rope.

  The rich girl watched during a fertile period, when many of the women were pregnant and a child took over the work, cutting her fingers and crying at the chore. The rich girl said to her father, "I will wear this cloth for more days, there is no harm," and she was beaten for that.

  "You will take away their very reason for existence," he said.25

  The poor girl's mother could have done with a piece of cloth or two, at least to wipe her running nose. The children of the village called her the Snot Hag, and told stories at night of how she hid children up her nose, drowned them in snot, then dug them out when she thought no one was looking and ate them up. The children avoided the Snot Hag. Her daughter kept all the rags. The rich daughter, as she grew, witnessed sickness and suffering and wondered why it would strike one and not the other. She spoke to her mother, who asked her father to beat her.

  "We do not ask questions of such magic," said her father. "We pray to the spirits and allow them to decide who should be taken and who left. We do not risk their ire by asking questions."

  But the rich girl wondered still. She could see the poor family, the girl and her mother, the daughter so well, bounding proudly, head high, in her wrappings, the mother so sick, so sniffling, horribly sick. The poor girl had an arrogance that denied her the friendship of the rich. She could not speak to someone who had eaten pig in the day when she had eaten scraps, when she had scraped the growth from food tossed to the animals and heated it in the sun, selling all firewood to buy milk so badly needed. The poor girl would not talk to the rich girl, not when she wore her rags, when she cleaned her place of cleansing. So the rich girl could not ask her directly. They could not discuss health and sickness.

  The rich girl was not allowed the freedom of the poor girl. She could not talk to the young men of the village. She could only watch them. Watching them working, feeling physically in pain for want of him, the son of the weaver. He was in a good position in the village; but not good enough. She was set to marry the son of another village. They had not met but she had heard stories of him. Of his size. He was large, and paler than many. This was said to be a sign of great birth. The rich girl, too, had pale skin. She did not see how that was superior, when she had to avoid the sun, as did he. They had something in common, then. They would stay together under cover, watching the work continuing.

  The rich girl spoke to the weaver's son once.

  "When will my cloth be ready?" she asked.

  "When you need it," he said. It was apparent that he thought her foolish, a space-waster. He thought she would never be worth anything. He was an honest man. If he was not, he could take her interest and turn it to his advantage.

  The rich girl watched the
weaver's son and the poor girl from her carefully protected area. The poor girl was disdainful of the men in her village. She wanted a stranger in her life, a man who did not know or care about her mother the Snot Hag. She walked a lot, and, one day, the rich girl followed.

  The poor girl wandered with a makeshift sack, knotted from scraps and rags. She gathered the roots they ate and sold. The rich girl watched as she plucked roots, nibbled the flowers from the plant and placed the root in her sack.

  The rich girl tasted a flower. It was sharp and sweet. She plucked the flowers alone, from an area the poor girl did not go to. She baked these flowers into flat cakes, and after finding approval from her mother, began distribution. Within two weeks, the hag's nose did not run and the rest of the village was well, also. The rich girl had begun to understand sickness and health.

  #

  Andra said, "That's how learning comes. Through curiosity."

  "The rich girl was curious, yes," Marvo said.

  Andra always felt good about what she did. She never hurt people.

  Marvo and Andra worked hard; their shows became famous for their sensuality. And they worked on tricks, tricks with water. Andra had promised the fish tank trick to their promoter; soon they would have to perform it. Marvo drank only water, he bathed often. He watched the water on a lake or a bay for hours.

  The water was always changing. Just before dawn it was as black as his vision of the future. He saw the bodies floating in the water, bloated, stretched.

  "I'm scared of water," he told Andra.

  "You're scared of nothing. You're just nervous of trying something new."

  "Why do you want to do it?"

  "Because it will make us famous."

  So they rehearsed. Marvo stopped visiting the lake at night.

  Stories of death found him, though, even when he stopped searching, when he practised the magic.

  They performed in an old church. Not the fish tank trick, but their best work. Throughout, Marvo felt as if there was someone on stage with them, helping out. But no one was there.

  "Do you see anyone?" he whispered to Andra as he transformed her into a morbidly obese woman about to burst.

  "It's a very spiritual place," she whispered back.

  After the show, the vicar thanked them for bringing comfort. "We are every last one of us bereaved," the vicar said. "All of us have lost a loved one. All of us are struggling to let go."

  The audience wouldn't leave.

  They hung around Marvo, wanting to talk to him. "You'll understand. You know about death and despair."

  Marvo felt attacked as they told him stories of soul and loss.

  A mother told a story to Marvo, sensing that he needed comforting, that he was seeking answers.

  Son

  This is the story of a death. A bitter death; a middle-aged child dead too soon, old parents left behind. The neighbours entered, to open the windows and let the poor child's soul out. His parents would not let the windows be opened. They wanted to keep his soul at least, if not his dear, dead body. They stayed in their home for many months, having food delivered by neighbours, pulling it through the cat door quickly. Their son's soul had dinner with them, and they always had his favourite meals. They talked a lot, in those months. Talked as if the past was the future, as if they had a future. They didn't stop the clock as they were told they should. They didn't want to be reminded that for the dead person time was over, that days and hours no longer mean anything. But they are not haunted.

  Dogs surrounded the parents' house at night, howling at the spirits waiting for the boy's soul to be released. He bred greyhounds when he was alive. The parents sat inside. The sound was so terrifying they couldn't eat. Dogs howl at night because they are conscious of spirits hovering around the house, ready at the moment of death to bear away the soul of the departed.

  Finally they released him.

  #

  Marvo felt pity for this loving pair. Marvo's boon to them was help to fade the love; he sped up the process. He made the boy become bad; evil, he went out and got into trouble.

  "Me! Me!" a young woman said. "I want to tell you a story."

  Claudia-Maude

  I was alone in the house when my father died of natural causes. He hissed and blinked, said, "Open the windows, Maude," and died. My name is Claudia.

  I don't know anyone called Maude.

  I knew about opening windows. My father wanted his soul to have somewhere to leave. I did not believe in the soul, or reincarnation, or anything like that, and I was tempted to leave the windows shut to prove it.

  I folded the crochet bedspread up under his arms, removed a pillow and laid his head back. He looked asleep; I turned the radio on to see if that would waken him.

  He lay motionless, unresponsive. I began to feel nervous. The room was stuffy; I needed some air. If I opened the windows it would be for air.

  I imagined my father trapped. He was bad enough sick, complaining of his own uselessness as if it was my fault. Constipating himself in embarrassment, the very idea of me seeing his stool in a bedpan.

  Imagine him trapped in the house, banging frantically against walls to get out, moaning and shouting and watching me.

  I moved from room to room, opening every window. Then I felt very ill.

  I called for help. The vicar came and closed the windows against the icy night. They nursed me to health. But my dad was gone by then. I waved goodbye in my mind.

  #

  Marvo did what she asked. He healed her guilt.

  He did not find Doctor Marcia Reid. She had a magic all her own. She made herself invisible.

  He knew the mist would need to be thick and the distraction great. He had all the knowledge he needed from his counterparts around the world.

  Eternal life would be his Roman circus.

  He saw a terrible war ahead which would kill ninety percent of the population. A war whose results would last forever, and if the people could see their future, they would not carry on. It would be over for humanity.

  The mist had to be thick, and the magic powerful if it was to keep them happy till then.

  The day came at last for the trick to be shown. Marvo was no longer nervous; the trick was like breathing now. He knew it was good, was wonderful, in fact. He was proud that Andra had designed it.

  There was quite a good crowd in, the day Marvo the Magician did not defy death.

  Children who loved him were there, on school excursions, or with parents or grandparents, older sisters and boyfriends, big brothers and the ones they kiss in the car. The adults were there for the kids, but they loved Marvo too. They loved him because he was beautiful, he made them feel good. After an afternoon with Marvo, the world did not seem so bad.

  Doctor Marcia Reid was there, watching from the audience, ignoring their love, thinking, "I'll shoot when he emerges, the moment his head rises, in the second when he's still tranced by his own magic."

  She was not a gun person by nature, but she had learnt. Her finger rested on the trigger and she waited for the trick to finish. She was dressed in a large coat with big pockets into which she could plunge both arms deep without arousing suspicion. This was where she held her gun.

  She had travelled by bus to the large theatre where she stood with a group of children. They had their own money but she said to the ticket taker, "They love playing grown-ups."

  The ushers had barely glanced at her and she did not look at them. She settled halfway down the auditorium and waited to be amazed.

  Marvo found missing children, made a chocolate appear in every lap, and created a dancing tableau using items from the audience: a hanky, some keys, a pen.

  Marvo circled the auditorium with fire, because he knew that fire was powerful. He whispered in every ear, "What do you see?" and they saw cars and lovers, islands, food, murder and slippery slides. As they stared, Marvo felt in pockets for little things he might like. He found lollies, coins, tissues, sand, seeds. These he kept; they were not missed
. He knew Andra would love these found items.

  At last it was the finale, the end of the show. Marvo appeared on stage amidst a thick mist.

  Marcia Reid snorted. Unoriginal. Look at that assistant woman performing her own magic, making the Devil look good.

  Making the evil magician look good.

  Doctor Reid rose slowly from her seat. The children were jumping and leaping; her movement was not noticed. She knew she needed to do this, that he should have died as a child, that he had lived a life which should not have existed.