by Rick Wayne
I sat up.
He moved toward me, hand outstretched. “I smashed your phone.”
I took it. “Yup,” I sighed. “You did.”
I felt the bent casing and ran a finger over the shattered screen. A piece of it came off in my hand. He’d done a very thorough job.
“If the curse cannot easily bring its tortures to you,” he said, “it will have to work harder. And that may give us purchase.”
He showed me another phone, someone else’s, maybe his. He’d smashed that as well.
“Did you smash my watch, too?”
I held up my wrist. The glass window was gone, as was everything from inside. There was nothing left but a hallow husk. It was oddly poetic. I stuck my little finger in and made tiny circles around the rim.
He bowed deeply to the water with great respect.
“Where are we?” I asked in a whisper, suddenly worried others may be near.
Judging from the hills and cooler temperature, I guessed mountains. I wanted it to be very, very far from everything, a place where not even a random stranger would wander.
“It’s better if you don’t know,” he said.
I nodded. I stood and looked at the pond. The disturbance had long since abated and I could once again see the cave that opened in the shadow of the rocky outcropping.
“But what is it?”
“Not what,” he breathed. “Who. I suspect she comes and goes these days, following the course of the underground river to and from the faraway lands. A door that was meant to be locked. They missed some, it seems. I suspect she checks in on us, from time to time.”
“She?” I looked to the moss-covered cave again.
“The lady of this place,” he said. “Come. We have bothered her enough.”
The cabin had well water that you had to pump from a long handle over the sink and no electricity. The interior smelled of earth and campfire. There was a stag’s head hanging over the main room from the railing of the loft where we slept. It’s antlers were huge. But it wasn’t scary. It seemed more like it was looking after us. It’s eyes peered out over the water stoically. There was no TV or internet or phone service or anything—it was a big deal just to get a newspaper—which meant there wasn’t much to do, so I went exploring and took lots of hikes. Étranger said it was safe as long as I kept near the little lake. I was sure to follow his instructions. There were water birds nesting, including a pair of mated cranes. I spent hours watching them: from the bank, from the porch, through the front windows of the cabin. He was so attentive. He brought her fish and cleaned her feathers and she took each of his gifts and promised him great speckled eggs in return.
But it was chilly up there, especially in the mornings, and I hadn’t brought any clothes with me. I expected we’d go shopping or something but was told repeatedly I couldn’t leave.
“Seriously? Not even for, like, an hour?”
He seemed less worried about the curse than those who’d caused it. It felt so odd being the pawn around which an entire game was being played, yet having no sense of the players or even the rules by which you moved. I asked if they could find me, even at the cabin, but he said no. He said it was a holy place, before Columbus even, and their spells wouldn’t be able to penetrate it. But just to be sure, he took one of the side mirrors off the car and broke it. Then he put one piece each over the cabin’s doors, facing out, and over all of the windows, too. He sent Milan to do my shopping for me. She and I talked a lot those days. She came back with some T-shirts and underwear and a big coat for me to wear on my walks. But the pickings were slim at the country store, and she knew it wasn’t my taste, so she also got a bunch of different iron-on patches and things so I could make it my own: a US Army logo, a muscle car, a tractor, some vintage candy brands, stars, a Christmas tree, a glittery number that said Rude Girl in pink and purple. It was also something to do, I guess—put them all on. We did it together, she and I. I really liked her. I absolutely cried the day she came back with a sketchpad and colored pencils. I hadn’t asked for them—I hadn’t thought to—which meant she’d been listening to me, like actually listening, and that meant more than anything. Having a friend, I guess. Its own a kind of magic.
Mr. Dench was around, too. My silent guardian. Usually patrolling the woods. He wasn’t much for conversation, but I drew him a lot. He has a naivete to him. Unlike Etude, who wears himself on his sleeve, Mr. Dench has the mystery of a small child, where you’re never quite sure what he’s thinking, or even if he’s thinking at all. Turns out he doesn’t have a heart. Go figure.
Etude was also there—he never left—but he was busy with preparations. I sensed he needed to concentrate so I tried not to bother him. But we played board games some nights.
“Go fish,” he said.
We were sitting at the little table, just the chef and I, while the crickets chirped outside and the fire crackled under the hearth. He was staring intently at the playing cards in his hand. I had like ten times more than he did.
“You’re cheating somehow,” I accused. “With magic. I just haven’t figured it out yet.”
Believe it or not, I managed to make it through everything with the tarot deck intact, and it was just about the only genuine entertainment we had at the cabin—outside of a combo chess/checkers set that was missing a few pieces. Etude said in Europe, that’s mostly how the tarot was used, for play rather than divination. He taught me a bunch of new games. I sucked at all of them.
“I do not cheat,” he insisted.
“Yeah. You don’t brood either.”
I drew a card. Seven of Wands.
“Do you have any sevens?” he asked.
I groaned and handed him the one I just drew. He placed a book of four sevens on the table.
“You are so cheating!”
“You never answered my question,” he said as he readjusted the last few cards in his hand.
“Huh?” I couldn’t remember him asking a question.
“Why a phoenix?”
“Oh.” I lifted my shirt and looked at my tattoo. Honestly I think I just wanted to make sure it was still there, that it hadn’t come to life at some point, as Fish suggested, and flown away. Nothing would have surprised me anymore.
“Because nothing can keep her down,” I said. “No matter what happens, she springs eternal. Like hope. She keeps reinventing herself.”
He nodded toward my cards. “Your turn.”
“Do you have any fives?”
He shook his head. I sighed and drew another card. The Ace of Wands. I handed it to him before he even asked and he took it without looking.
Don’t ever play cards with a sorcerer. Like, ever.
I set my cards face down on the table and sat back. “So, wait.” I knew him well enough by then to know he wasn’t asking about my tattoo out of simple curiosity. “What are you suggesting? That I’m like a free radical or something?”
“Unbounded feminine energy,” he corrected.
I thought for a moment. “Someone told me my soul sparks.”
“It is an odd way to put it,” he said, still studying the cards in his hand.
“So how would you put it?”
He saw my cards on the table. He set his down as well.
“Our ancestors noticed how the whole world, from the animals to the heavenly bodies, were split into opposing principles, pairs of opposites: day and night, water and land, plant and animal, male and female, sun and moon. Even modern physics suggests that is the very nature of the universe, that creation itself is carpeted in particles—spontaneous matter-antimatter pairs—that merge and separate, separate and merge in a continuous froth, and that if you combined everything with its opposite, you would reduce the universe to one. The cosmic equation.”
“Spontaneous pairs . . .”
“Indeed.”
“Have you ever been in love?” I asked. “I mean, like, really in love? Not the go-on-dates kind but the scary kind, where it feels like if you give in to it, y
ou’ll lose yourself, your individuality, completely?”
He was silent a moment and wouldn’t look at me and I thought I’d committed some horrible breach of magical etiquette or something. When he finally spoke, his voice was very soft.
“From birth, I was trained to be the shaman of my village. The conclusion of that training began on my thirteenth birthday, when I was blindfolded and abandoned deep in the jungle, there to remain until I returned a man. Or not at all. The purpose was to discover—to know—the great source of life in whose service I would spend the rest of my days. As healer of my people. We called her Ixhua’ti. You might call her Gaia. Or Mother Nature.”
“You saw her?”
Etude looked down at his open, tattooed palms.
“I see her every day. As do you.” He held up his hands again. “She gave me these.”
I stared at the intricate designs. Like hieroglyphs made from Nazca lines.
“Wait.” The reality of his words hit me and I closed my eyes. “You’re telling me that you fell in love with the earth?”
The way he talked, in the past tense and everything, I got the sense they weren’t seeing each other anymore, the sorcerer and the earth-mother, and that made me sad. If someone like him couldn’t make it work, how could any of the rest of us? But then, those days, everything made me sad. I thought about Kell all the time. Almost every minute, if I let myself.
And Kai.
I got up and got a drink from the tap. “The whole idea of being ‘made for’ someone is just stupid. It doesn’t even make any sense when you think about it. It means you don’t have a choice. How can that be? Shouldn’t love be a choice? Is it really all that special if you literally can’t not do it?”
“Is that what you are worried about?”
I held my fingers under the tap like I was washing them.
“Your tragedy,” he said, “is that you met each other so young. There was no struggle. No pain of uncertainty. Like being granted loving parents. Those with take them for granted and rebel anyway. Those without are eternally mindful of the gap. But none of this has anything to do with what you are feeling. Does it?”
“What if he says no?” I breathed.
Étranger nodded. “Love entails risk. Always. But the alternative is not life. In your case,” he added quickly, “quite literally.”
Irfan was right. It didn’t matter what path I chose at the Watchtower. I have to die. It’s the only way to protect everyone I love.
Really, really, really, really, really sucks though.
He told me the plan one night and I just sat at the table in silence. He waited for probably twenty minutes before I even moved a muscle.
“Seriously? Like, no joke? Not symbolism or metaphor or whatever? Like, for real?”
“Of course,” he said, as if the implication was insulting.
“But.” I put a hand to my forehead. “I mean. How? How is that possible?”
He nodded to my side. “Because you are the phoenix.”
So, okay. This is how it works. I have to swallow something called a jewel of many colors, the big cut gem that his hostess, Milan, wears around her neck. It’s like the size of a walnut! Etude said it refracts the light of what can’t be seen. With it, he’ll be able to find me among all the other shades in the dark of the underworld. Then he has to perform some kind of ritual—at the end of which he stabs me in the heart.
Zoinks.
After I’m dead, he’ll drain every last drop of blood from my body and burn it away. With that, the curse will definitely be broken.
“Why blood?” I asked.
“Hebrews 9:22,” he said. “Everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.”
He’ll cremate my body and bury the ashes in the place of my birth, sort of the reverse of how vampires have to lay in the soil in which they were buried. But that means they’ll have to take me to Hong Kong and sneak onto the hospital grounds somehow—him and Dench and Milan. Not that I’m worried. I get the sense they’ve done this kind of thing before.
Next the mixture has to sit for a couple days. Étranger says Jesus wasn’t wrong there. Then my new friend will don his mask and the bright feathered garb and take his drum and descend to the underworld, like the shamans of old. To find me. And do battle with Death, I guess.
Man, I wish I could see that.
Shit.
Maybe I will.
Anyway, while he’s down there, our friends up here will exhume the soil containing my ashes and seal it in a large urn, which represents the womb. The urn will be baked the moment my soul returns. He showed me a big old book with a bunch of pictures, like the pages I saw in Lykke’s office.
“It recapitulates the vital heat of creation,” he said.
But this is the most dangerous part because the seal can’t be broken. If any part of it is cracked for whatever reason, the “humours” escape, and I’m lost for good.
He keeps telling me not to worry.
After that, their part is done, and that’s where it gets tricky. The urn has to be incubated, like an egg. Etude said that just means watched, looked after, for a full cycle of the moon—its death and rebirth, one turn of a woman’s womb, the life-creator. The kicker is, it can’t just be anybody sitting there. Even someone who loves me, like Mom and Dad. To pull me back, my soul has to be whole, which means it has to be the other half of my spontaneous pair. The sun to my moon. The sky to my earth. The yang to my yin. The guy I’ve known since forever. The one with the very same birthday. The first one I kissed. The only one I ever really loved. The only one I left.
So.
Yeah.
I have no idea what he’s going to do when he reads this. But if he doesn’t totally flip, if he sits patiently by the urn and reads to me, or catches me up on all the stupid music he likes, I’ll have a totally new body. Etude says most of my memories will be there but it might be spotty. He also said he’s not sure if the tattoo will come through. That’ll be new for him. We bet fifty bucks. I said it will because it’s part of me. I’m totally gonna win too, because karma. We played so many games at the cabin and he never let me win. Not even once!
So . . . that’s it, I guess. They’re kinda waiting on me now. Little bit nervous. It’s so crazy not knowing what’s going to happen in, like, an hour. But then, we never really do, do we? We just think we do, until something happens to wake us from the illusion—a car crash, news of cancer, a child’s first breath. Etude says that’s where Life is lived. Not respiration and metabolism. Not work and school and laundry and groceries. Not the long sleep of existence but where it shatters. Those few brief flashes where we’re awake to our own consciousness, like a too-bright light. That’s where the angels live, the ones he called the Others. I think that’s where he lives, too.
But not me. I can barely stand it. I feel burnt down, like my mind is on fire, like someone turned the saturation of the world to 200% and it hurts my eyes to look. Knowing these moments could be my last, I sit catatonic with wonder. The slightest breath enchants me. The patient throb of my heart. The bend of the light through the pane. The bob of a branch as a bird alights. I want to draw it all, to reflect, if only in one image, that rapture I feel, the rapture of being alive. I think that’s all art is, really.
We never really know what’s going to happen next. Even when we think we do. So I guess we’ll see.
I guess we’ll see.
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The old ones are patient, and not so easily fooled.
After the death of Solomon, wisest of rulers, the kingdom of the Hebrews was distributed equitably among his heirs, who distrusted each other as mightily as their father was wise. Swiftly they fell, with many other lands, to the conquerer, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. As was his practice, the new king took hostage every mal
e youth, both high-born and . . . . . . were marched east to study the Chaldean sciences—what the Hebrews called ‘the black arts’—in the hopes that a whole generation would be converted to the Babylonian faith and return to the lands of their ancestors to marry, multiply, and so to erase without bloodshed the famously fanatical cult of Yahweh. For above all, Nebuchadnezzar desired a Babylon eternal and would brook no rivals.
It was one of these sons of Abraham, a boy named Daniel . . . with . . . excelled at his studies above . . . and was allowed to interpret the king’s dreams, an honor normally reserved for the High Priest of the Temple of Marduk. So impressed was Nebuchadnezzar that he dismissed his ministers’ objections and kept the young man’s counsel day and night, walking with him through the hanging gardens he had built to please his fickle queen . . . had barely noticed them. The king no doubt disliked what he heard, for Daniel referred to him as ‘the destroyer of nations’ and said Nebuchadnezzar’s own kingdom, his great and unprecedented legacy which surpassed even the mighty empires of Sumeria, would crumble and fall and be supplanted by mightier empires still, over and over, until at last a pinnacle was reached, a precipice from which the world itself would tumble back into darkness. Such was the arrogance and folly of the course the king charted.
The Book of Daniel is full of prophecies like that, some as opaque as a pale mirror. It’s only with . . . You can believe Daniel was a charlatan, or you can believe that his vagary was intentional, that he had witnessed something so terrible, so frightening, he dared not say it outright. For in truth, Nebuchadnezzar was vexed by visions beyond reason . . . He prayed to his gods first, as all men do. He prayed to the sky god Marduk, who had slain the many-headed dragon and so forged civilization out of chaos. He prayed to Enki and Ishtar and Enlil. But the gods and goddesses of Babylon were as silent as their stone-walled temples, as still as their marble-faced statuary, and the king despaired.
In righteous anger, Nebuchadnezzar demanded his priests call upon different gods, older gods still whose names had passed from memory but whose crypts could still be found deep under the twice-ancient cities of Ur and Uruk. And so archaic seals were broken and relic hymns were sung and fresh sacrifices made numbering in the . . . of thousands, and a narrow portal was forged, no wider than a pinprick such that no evil could slip through, and across it, the old gods, whose names were blighted by men, were summoned in parlay.