The spell book was lying half-open a step below me, and I swiped for it.
I scanned the page of the spell again, looking for clues, but I saw only the title at the very top, in a blurred, old-fashioned typeface: Heart’s Desires.
“Who are you?” I asked.
He opened his mouth, closed it, and wrapped his arms around himself. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember your name? Or you don’t remember anything?”
He shook his head. “Anything,” he said sadly. “Nothing at all.”
“Do you grant wishes?”
“No,” he said, and then his mouth curved up into a small, rueful smile. “Not that I know of, at least. I guess we could try.”
“I wish for a cat,” I said. It just slipped out. I was trying to think of something small and not dangerous, something I’d know immediately had arrived. “No. Stop. I take that back. I don’t want a cat, that doesn’t count. I want a hundred million dollars. In dollars, not coins. In hundred-dollar bills, I mean. Right here in front of me. Make it appear.”
The man looked at me with a slightly amused expression, and when no cat or money appeared, he turned his palms up and grinned. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think it would work.”
His smile sent a rush of blood to my face, but I forced myself not to smile back. That was how I responded to beauty, in both women and men: drawn to it at first, and then recoiling. Ruled by my own shallow impulses, then angry at the trick.
“It’s a bit cold in here,” he said gently. “I wonder if I might have a blanket?”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
* * *
Upstairs in the kitchen, I paced around, flipping the knife back and forth in my hand. Part of me thought, okay, just give the naked guy a blanket! But another part resisted. This spell was not straightforward. If it wasn’t black magic, then it was slippery magic at least. Because if he’d said, “I’m a pediatric oncologist, but I write poetry on the side,” all right, maybe, heart’s desire. But what good was a handsome amnesiac to me? Also, historically, chalk circles contain devils and demons, not potential boyfriends. Giving him anything might mean bridging the circle and setting him free. If I screwed this up, I might not get another chance to make it right. Before I did anything else, I needed to give the spell book another look.
He’d be fine. After all, the basement wasn’t that cold.
* * *
When I made my way downstairs several hours later, my guest—sitting on the ground, his arms wrapped tightly around his legs—was looking rather pale. There was a damp spot on the far side of the circle, and the basement smelled now not only of burnt hair, but of piss.
Oops.
“I’m sorry I kept you waiting so long,” I said. “I’ve got that blanket for you now. And I’ll run upstairs and grab you an empty Gatorade bottle or something in just a bit.”
The man looked up at me. “Listen,” he said. “I know this must seem strange to you, but I swear, it’s even stranger to me. I’ll do whatever you ask me to do, and I won’t hurt you, I promise, but please, at least try: If you were to smudge this circle up a bit, or wash it off entirely, maybe I could get out, and we could go upstairs and talk this over?”
“Yeah . . .” I said. “I’m not going to do that. I’m sorry, it’s just, you could be a demon or something, and I can’t take that chance. But I think I’ve come up with a way to figure it out. Listen, I’m going to hand you the blanket, assuming I can reach through the circle. I want you to take it, but then I want you to leave your hand right there, at the edge, where I can reach it. Don’t try anything. Got it?”
“I’ve got it,” he sighed.
I thrust the blanket at him. He took it, keeping his hand outstretched, as I’d told him to do, and I slashed the blade of my knife across the back of his arm.
“What the fuck?” he shouted. As he jumped back, he collided with the other side of the chalk circle, bashing his head against it, and it was dizzying to watch, the way the empty air seemed to catch him as he slid down the invisible barrier. I’d cut him more deeply than I’d meant to, and a thick line of red was welling from his forearm. He stared at me in horror, jamming his back against the far edge of the circle as though if he pushed hard enough he might be able to break through.
“Give me your arm again,” I said.
“Hell no,” he answered, cradling it with his other hand.
I took a wad of gauze out of my back pocket. “I need your blood,” I said. “I’m sorry. I just need to test something. Once I do, I’ll let you out right away, I promise.”
He actually snarled at me. “Get the fuck away from me, you crazy bitch,” he said.
* * *
The next morning, I came downstairs with a tray laden with every delicious thing the coffee shop next door had on offer: a steaming mug of French roast coffee, thick with cream and sugar; a buttery, flaky croissant; a yogurt parfait jammed full of red berries; a sliced onion bagel slathered with cream cheese and draped with slabs of bright pink lox. The basement itself stank worse than before, but the aroma of the food cut through it, even so.
I set the tray on the floor, averting my eyes from the worst of the mess in the circle as my guest eyed me with loathing. If I was wrong about how the spell book worked, and the universe had been trying to send me my soul mate, I’d blown my chance for sure.
With gritted teeth, he shoved his arm at me. The wound had closed up, black and crusty.
“Give me your other arm,” I said, taking the knife out again. He glared at me, his lip curled up, and didn’t move.
* * *
I know, I know, but listen: I’d read it wrong. Heart’s Desires, printed at the top of the page; not the name of the spell, but the name of the book. That first spell was nameless, like the man I’d summoned. But the next spell, Wealth, contained, in its long list of ingredients, along with silver and juniper, green candles and rosemary, not blood, but heart’s blood, written in that same blurry font. I’d tested the spell myself the night before, pricking another small hole in my thumb, and nothing had happened. It was his blood I needed. I had to take it from him.
I pointed at the food, still well outside his reach. “I’ll wait as long as it takes,” I said.
* * *
I did the spell in the basement, while the man in the circle gobbled his breakfast. No wads of bills miraculously appeared. I was about to call the police and ask them to come arrest the crazy squatter who’d broken into my house when my phone rang with a call from an unknown number.
A laughing heir is what you’re called when the relative who dies and leaves you everything is so distant you don’t know them well enough to mourn.
* * *
I gave him a pillow to go with the blanket, a pair of shorts, one of those little camping latrines, as much water and good food as he wanted, as long as he cooperated. “Please, don’t,” he said when I came back, but what would you have done?
After a week, he tried to wrestle the knife away from me, drag me back to the circle with him, but he was a day too late: I’d already done the spell for strength.
* * *
I swear, I treated him as well as I could. I stopped cutting up his arms; I drew the knife as lightly as possible across his back and bandaged him up afterward. They healed reasonably well, especially given the dampness of the basement: no more ugly, crusty wounds, just a web of thin pink lines, fading prettily to silver.
It wasn’t easy, even after weeks had gone by. No one had ever been afraid of me before, and every time he flinched at the sight of me, I felt as though my heart had gotten caught on a nail.
Only when I’d finished the third spell, intelligence, could I articulate my defense. Nameless, history-less, a body tailored precisely to my lust . . . even his lilting accent had come from somewhere deep in my dreams. I hadn’t just called him but created him. Therefore, since I’d gathered him together out of herbs and blood and magic and
desire, he wasn’t quite real. He was another part of the book, like the spells themselves, or the lists of ingredients that prefaced them. Not a person, not really, but an idea, brought into being by the play of my mind and the words on the page.
Intelligence was a good gift. I should have conjured it first, because I slept a whole lot better after that.
* * *
“You look different,” he said to me one morning, and it was true. Sometimes, it took a few hours or days for a spell to unravel its thin skein of logic, winding its way toward my inheritance, or my astonishingly rapid promotion to CEO. But other times, I just woke up different: that’s how it had been with strength and intelligence and now beauty.
“Yes,” I said. Given that I had myself fairly well convinced of his fundamental unreality, it came as a surprise, how much I enjoyed the look he gave me then—desired it, desired him. Now that I had my own beauty, my own set of tricks, I could let down my guard a bit.
I started to spend more and more time in the basement. He didn’t say much back, but at least he listened. We were both lonely. I couldn’t talk to anyone else about all the astonishing things that had begun to happen to me, and after long days alone in that cramped, dark little circle, he couldn’t help but crave my company. Or he did a good job pretending he did.
One night, late, more than a little drunk, I promised him that when I was finished, when the book was done and there were no more spells to cast, I’d let him out of the circle and share it all with him. After all, I slurred, it’s as much yours as mine. I wasn’t naive—I knew I could never trust him. But he was so lovely I couldn’t help but want him, and I was now in the habit of getting what I wanted. Of course, I knew he wouldn’t be able to forgive me. Not without my help. I’d tried to avoid looking too closely at the upcoming spells—it felt strangely disrespectful, like skipping ahead to the last page of a book—but I knew the title of the last one was love.
And then a new ingredient appeared on the list.
* * *
By then, we’d established a kind of equilibrium, so when I came downstairs carrying the knife, he offered his back to me. I looked at him and felt sick. His once-perfect muscles had softened into loose, unhealthy flesh; his skin was pasty white from days spent crouching in the dark. I saw how, despite the care I’d taken, the newest cuts were still raw, weeping through the bandages, and the way each of the knobby bones of his spine cast its own distinct shadow. I felt the stinging guilt of it, and I thought about stopping, scuffing over the circle, and setting him free. I had never desired him more than I did then, broken and ugly and needing me. Besides: Given everything I already possessed—wealth, success, luck, intelligence, strength, beauty—what more could power offer me?
I spun the knifepoint in my palm, torn. We were only halfway through the book.
“I’m sorry,” I said, still spinning the knife, spinning until my hand burned and bled. “We have to do something different today.”
* * *
One spell, then another, then another. Every night, the tears became harder and harder to wring out of him. I screamed, I begged and pleaded, I cried myself. I even said, in a moment of weakness: Don’t you realize I’m doing this for us? But I also became creative, and not only with the knife. He cried from pain, he cried from fear, he cried from loneliness, he cried from exhaustion and confusion. And he cried for me. Some nights, I crept into the circle with him and held him as he wept, and I whispered to him about how it would be when we were together at last, when all of this was done.
A year went by. He cried, I collected every salty drop, and the world cracked open like an egg at my feet. I didn’t just have everything I wanted, or thought I wanted, or had imagined wanting; I had everything that could be wanted. I invented new needs just to satisfy them.
On the day I reached the last page of the book, I gathered up all the other ingredients and carried them down to the basement: herbs from the farmer’s market, trinkets from the dollar store.
He was curled on the ground, unmoving, pale and still, and when I saw him, I let out a little cry. His eyes fluttered open.
“Shhhhhhh,” I said, and smiled. I reached into the circle and stroked his arm. No place on his body was unmarked by a crisscrossing of silver shining scars. I wondered if they’d all be erased by this last spell, if he’d come to me fresh-skinned, as good as new.
“My love, my love,” I crooned.
He hadn’t formed coherent words in months, but he groaned and twitched, and I gently squeezed his shoulder, stroked what was left of his hair.
I flipped open the book to the last page, folding it backward. We’d burn the book together, he and I, once the spells were done. My love brought back to me, reborn and whole.
Except—wait.
No. Oh, no.
Before my eyes, the spell blurred, and changed. Demanded something else from me. From him. I could have cried, but instead, I laughed. I laughed and laughed and laughed. It always turns out this way, doesn’t it? You can’t have everything your heart desires, because what would be the moral in that?
I stared back at the spell, willing it to rearrange itself, but it did not.
So I entered the circle and dragged him out. I remembered, a year ago, screaming and scrambling away from him. How tall and intimidating he’d been. Now I had strength, and he weighed next to nothing. I unfolded his limbs, peeled off his tattered shirt. I took my knife, straddled his chest. I bent down to kiss his dried, cracked lips and placed the tip of my blade at his breastbone. I would find some other love, my own heart’s true desire. The promise was right there in the book.
“Don’t be scared,” I whispered.
heart’s blood
heart’s tears
heart
The Matchbox Sign
This, before anything—
Laura, studying in a bar in Red Hook in the middle of the day. A stack of library books at her elbow, a pencil stabbed through the tangled black bun of her hair. Dusty jeans, a ragged sweater, and a dark red lipstick that seems to David, who is watching her from across the room, both seductive and completely out of place. She yanks the pencil out to underline a page and, in doing so, knocks her beer over with her elbow; in saving the books, she allows herself to be drenched from knee to thigh. That night, as David rubs traces of it off his chin, Laura will tell him that the lipstick is a strategy: put on red lipstick as soon as you get up in the morning, she’ll say, and no matter how unkempt you are otherwise—stained clothes, leftover eyeliner, greasy hair—people will think you’re glamorous instead of slovenly. But the truth is that Laura is both glamorous and slovenly; her slovenliness is glamour; there is no contradiction there. And, David thinks, the decision to combat grime with lipstick is surely a fashion philosophy safely adopted only by the young and very beautiful; the kind of effortlessly luminous girl on whom even dirt and ugly clothes can serve as a kind of boast: see, not even this can diminish me.
* * *
Six months in, even though they say I love you, do ordinary couple things like complain about their friends and squabble about what time to go to brunch, there remains a part of David that expects Laura to look up at him one day, startled, and say: Wait, this is a joke, right? Who the fuck are you?
Then, one evening, she arrives an hour late to dinner. Instead of announcing the breakup he always suspects is imminent, she declares that she has quit her grad program; she wants him to take that job offer he’s been wavering on, so that they can move across the country, “try out California,” start afresh.
Does David want to quit his job and move to California? Laura’s sudden passion for this new life she has imagined for them is so dazzling that he genuinely cannot tell. But that night, Laura is brushing her teeth with the same reckless energy she brings to everything she does, and when she spits into the sink, the white foam is shot through with stringy gobs of red. She bends toward the mirror and grimaces at her reflection, fascinated, her teeth bared in a bloodstained snarl. In the wake of w
hat comes after, David will return to this memory, as a kind of omen: Laura, rapt before a mirror, marveling at the sight of her own blood.
* * *
A year later, Laura accosts David as soon as he walks in the door.
“Look at this,” she demands, before he even has a chance to put his briefcase down. “Look at my arm. I have a bite.”
David takes her wrist gingerly in one hand, and she presents the soft, speckled underside of her arm for his inspection. “Oh, shit,” he says. “What is this? Bedbugs?” Rumors of bedbug infestations have run rampant throughout their San Francisco neighborhood, though it seems impossible that any such shy, night-loving creatures could survive for long in their gleaming apartment of steel and glass.
“No,” Laura says. “Bedbugs are small and red and come in clusters. This isn’t bedbugs.”
Making a claim about the bite requires him to look closer at her arm than he is fully comfortable with—just thinking about itching makes him want to scratch—but he can see a fat, white welt, two inches across, nestled inside her elbow. It’s crisscrossed with pink lines from where she’s been working at it. Too big for a mosquito bite. “A spider bite, maybe?” he asks.
“Maybe . . .”
“Anyway, don’t touch it.” This advice is as much for his benefit as hers: he hates that sound, nail on skin. It reminds him of the nauseating squish of gum chewing, or a nasal hack in the back of the throat.
Laura flops back on the couch, stretching her arm as far away from her as she can, as though to distance herself from temptation. David knows her resolve will last all of five minutes unless he helps her out.
As he scoops calamine lotion onto her arm, massaging it into her skin, he asks, “How was your day off?”
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