Summer in the City of Roses

by Michelle Ruiz Keil

  In such cases, the course may be reversed by enacting a psycho-narrative change such that the affected person is able to release and/or incorporate the elements and/or experiences in such a way as to render the physical transfiguration unnecessary. This operation requires: 2

  A willing subject

  A trusted psychopomp

  Trained ritual participants

  At the bottom of the page are footnotes:

  See the tales “Tam Lin” and “The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf.”

  See ancient Greek dream theaters—Asklepion.

  Iph knows “Tam Lin”—the story of Janet, whose lover is taken by the Fairy Queen. To get him back she must grab him and hold on no matter what as he morphs into a succession of terrifying beasts. The other one with the weird name she’s never heard of. And what the hell is a psychopomp?

  She needs paper, and of course there is a stack of index cards and a box of small, perfectly sharpened silver pencils at the end of the shelf—the enchanted cottage version of the scrap paper and golf pencils they keep by the lookup computers at the library and at Powell’s. After writing down The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf, she goes to the dictionary, unsurprised to find it already opened to P.

  PSYCHOPOMP, noun

  plural noun: psychopomps; noun: psychopompos; plural noun: psychopompi (in Greek mythology) a guide of souls to the place of the dead.

  The spiritual guide of a living person’s soul (“a psychopomp who stays by her and walks in her dreams”).

  Iph thinks back to last night’s dream—if that’s even what it was—and the white dog who led her into the forest. Not the Malamute who brought her clothes to her, who is clearly a minion, but the regal moon-colored hound. Definitely a psychopomp.

  She carries the book to the workroom window seat. On the wide sill is a cup of steaming black tea, flavored with roses and pale with the perfect amount of cream. She sits and reads.

  She closes the book when she hears singing from the library, something that sounds vaguely like doo-wop or Motown. Iph finds several books with spines sticking out an inch or two, asking to be chosen. She takes her stack back to the window seat.

  A Feminist Reimagining of Jodorowsky

  The Theater of the Oppressed

  Individuation in Fairy Tales

  Flying Ointment: The Witch’s Book of Depth Psychology

  Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

  Grimm’s Fairy Tales with an Introduction by Carl Jung

  The Pan Within: Transmuting the Masculine

  Radical Intuition: Lessons from Baba Yaga

  In My Mother’s Garden: The Somatics of

  Intergenerational Trauma

  There is too much to read. Too much to learn. The stakes are too high.

  She puts her head down. There is a sound, little clicking hoofbeats. She looks up. Like a player piano, the typewriter is moving on its own.

  The message reads: Bibliomancy: foretelling the future by interpreting a randomly chosen passage from a book.

  As Iph reads the sentence, another forms.

  You can do this.

  There is a yellow legal pad Iph didn’t notice before and a cup full of tall pencils, this time licorice black.

  Back at the window seat is another steaming cup of tea and a plate—a golden grilled cheese and tomato sandwich, carrot sticks, and sliced strawberries. Now her throat aches, because this is Mom’s special lunch for her. Her favorite. Maybe there’s a phone in this house. Maybe she can call Mom. Get help. But what would she say? The ache turns to laughter. She must be hysterical—a word she hates, but if the laughing/crying/hyperventilating fits . . .

  She looks around the room. Curtains embroidered with forest flora blow in the breeze. The creamy stucco walls are rough and peaked like meringue, covered in small paintings, etchings, and shadow-boxed objects—a little plastic doll, a spool of red thread and thimble, a rusty military medal on a purple ribbon, a shiny brass bullet casing and a playing card, the ace of hearts; a baby’s white sock, a red-capped mushroom, a pressed pansy, a diminutive silver spoon. Ordinary, sentimental objects that somehow in this context don’t seem ordinary at all. This whole thing is both magical and surreal. Like the Brothers Grimm meets Theater of the Absurd.

  What Iph needs now is fairy-tale logic. She is desperate for her mother. She tries to imagine her now, in her residency studio surrounded by redwoods. Iph suddenly wishes she could see the sky.

  A crow caws outside the window. They know things, Mom always says. Iph heads to the back door she noticed earlier in the kitchen. Outside is a creek crisscrossed with bridges. The most delightful things! Little replicas of Portland’s bridges across the Willamette. Iph is drawn to them—but which to cross? The familiar Hawthorne? The industrial beauty of the group, the Steel Bridge? Over the Burnside Bridge replica is a miniature of the famous Portland sign with its retro neon leaping stag. This seems like the most likely candidate until she walks toward the creek and sees it around a short bend: the St. John’s Bridge, Portland’s pale jade empress. Memories of summers past wash over her—the years they had the boat, before Dad started working so much. They would sail down the river from the Forest Lake boat club all the way to Cathedral Park, right under this bridge, Dad’s favorite.

  Iph crosses in a few steps and walks down a narrow path to the tallest tree she’s seen outside California.

  The redwood is as thick around as the linked arms of at least ten children playing ring-around-the-rosy and so tall she can’t see the top. She approaches slowly and touches the bark. The comfort is instant, like a hug from someone who loves her. She wraps her arms around the tree. She falls to her knees. The ground is spongy and sweet-smelling, dotted with mushrooms. She digs like an animal until she’s buried her hands to the wrists. She lies on her side, fetal in the womb of the forest. Mom, she thinks, sending her thoughts to the roots of this tree, imagining it sending out a tendril to its neighbor, on and on through the forested lands of the West Coast to the redwoods in Santa Cruz, a kids’ cup-and-string telephone-style SOS. We need you. Help us!

  She closes her eyes and maybe even sleeps. After a while, she rises and turns back to the cottage. Behind the kitchen is a garden, fenced against deer. Beyond it, she sees large dark shapes moving in the trees. The wild animals who have cared for her brother. Her brother, asleep, his body changing in a way Mom’s puberty talks and embarrassing illustrated books would never have anticipated.

  Iph returns to her window seat. The grilled cheese still looks as if it came out of the pan and is almost too hot to touch. She eats the strawberries first. She’ll save the carrots to munch as she reads. Eating and reading at the same time is a primary pleasure of hers, the ultimate comfort.

  She looks down at the note, which she must have pulled from the typewriter because here it is, tucked inside Artemis’s Arrow: Performance Practice and the Reclamation of Wildness.

  Bibliomancy? Well, she’ll try it. She opens to a page: Instinct is the primary tool of the artist.

  She takes up the next book, Ritual for the Modern Witch, and opens to: The drum is ritual’s heartbeat.

  She sips and reads and makes her notes on every book in the stack. There is a rhythm to her work, like creating a collage. An idea is forming, a plan where none seemed possible.

  10

  Only the

  Voice of a Stag

  Orr’s body is a castle with stained glass windows for eyes and jeweled caverns for intestines. His toes are secret coves at the edge of a warm blue sea.

  Red-haired girls in yellow dresses dance on the sand, none of them Plum. They laugh and whisper and run away, looking back now and then as if daring him to follow. He shadows them to the entrance of a cave that is barnacled and covered with slime. A briny wind from deep inside the rock formation blows his hair behind him like the robe of a
king. It is long again, longer than ever, all the way down to his waist. His walk slows, as befits his royalty, understanding the paradox of simultaneously walking into and being the stone castle, the cliff, the beach, the girls, even the sea.

  The cave narrows for a long, dark stretch, then opens wide. He is not inside his own body now, but the body of a whale. A whale inside a book about a puppet inside a dream, like a Jungian Matryoshka doll.

  The puppet maker’s chair is empty and on the little table sit three frogs. One is Plum. Orr knows this. One is Iph. One is Mom. He must kiss them to find out who is who, but he can’t bring himself to touch their green-brown warty skin. They croak, singing. Their frog song pitches higher, and the frogs are transforming. They are birds now, little brown sparrows. They fly away and leave Orr alone. He weeps for them, all of them. But he knows: in this moment, none of them are the right choice.

  He sits in the chair and waits as his hair grows longer. He is restless. He moves around the little room. There is a dresser with three drawers. The first has a mirror inside it. The second, a pair of scissors, and the third, a fat carrot with a feathery green top.

  Orr looks into the mirror. A three-eyed deer boy with tall antlers looks back. He blinks. Three eyes blink back. He takes the scissors. He cuts his hair, first in big chunks, and then in careful snips so it is close to his head. He gathers the hair and places it in a large pot filled with water on the round-bellied woodstove he now notices. He makes a fire. The pot boils, and the air smells of roses and patchouli and rotting leaves. He remembers the carrot. It is still there. He eats it, savoring the greens on top. Looking in the mirror now, his face is covered in a fine down, and his third eye is closed, concealed by furring.

  The hair soup on the stove is singing like a kettle, but it’s not a kettle. It’s the woman from the X-Ray, the blond sylph. She rises with the steam and turns into a cloud. The cloud dissolves the whale cave, and Orr is on an island. His mother approaches from the end of the beach. “I’m coming,” she says, but never gets any closer. “Wait for me!”

  Orr is gazing at his reflection in a puddle collected in the smooth bowl of a boulder and sees himself, a long-haired boy waiting for his mother. His face tightens and shrinks. The hair grows down his forehead to cover his eyes, his nose, his mouth. He is mummified by hair.

  He is back in his bed at home. He dreams of Plum and music and sex, but the world is too loud. He steps out of the boy in the bed and observes him.

  He is onstage after the show at the X-Ray, looking for Plum.

  The stage is revolving, turning him away from the people in the club, pointing him toward the forest.

  He is running through the city, keenly aware of every danger with his mouth and nose and ears. His eyes work even faster than his legs, so well it’s like he’s able to speed up time. He always knows what’s coming.

  He reaches the forest and doesn’t stop running until he sees the stone building. There is the long-legged white dog. No, it’s a woman. Long-legged, white-haired, tall, and slender in silver earrings and a green sweater. She whistles a low call Orr feels in the newly hardened soles of his feet.

  The deer come, crowding around him.

  11

  The Subconscious

  and The Actor’s

  Creative State

  Iph sleeps and dreams in black and white. A movie musical starring her and George. They meet and the dialogue sparkles. They dance and are light as air. They kiss and the sky opens, drenching them with rain. They bicker and make up. They are in danger and save each other. The movie ends and Iph rewinds.

  12

  The Unfamiliar

  Voice

  When Orr wakes from his deep-dreaming slumber and stumbles into the main room of the cottage, Iph is asleep in the window seat. There is food on the table in the cheerful kitchen. Fruit and a salad of tomatoes and corn. Eating makes Orr want to move. As the sun sets into the blue hour, Orr hears them. Looking out the window, he sees them. Not the does who sheltered him the night before, but bucks with budding antlers and strong musks.

  Orr itches to go outside, but memory stops him—playground children promising joy that always turned to cruelty or confusion. He closes the curtains. Closes his eyes.

  A melody sounds from somewhere in the cottage. It is coming from the tree-arched entryway. From the front door? Then he sees that its source is the doorknob, shaped like a hare’s head, with tall ears and a slender snout. The brass animal’s mouth is open, and it is singing. The song is familiar. It takes Orr a while to figure out how he knows it. Finally, he connects the sweet, high voice of the surreal brass hare with the buzz-saw punk-rock anthem Iph blasted last year after she divorced her awful friends. She played it so loud and so often it drove the whole family crazy:

  I will resist with all my breath

  I will resist this psychic death

  He didn’t understand it back then. It sounded like noise. Now he gets it, and it gives him courage. He takes off the striped leggings that belonged to Plum and leaves them on the floor. He walks naked into the meadow. The ground is still warm underfoot from the just-set sun. The grass is sweet, with a lemon and ginger sharpness. Orr bends, pulls a blade from the ground. Puts it on his tongue. It tastes the way it smells. Better, even.

  The largest buck snorts. Taps the ground with a gleaming hoof. The tails of the three others twitch. Their scent is heady and terrifying. The night glows so blue it blues Orr’s skin. Or is it hair—hair or fur? The air is cool. The moon is rising huge and gold above the tree line. He looks down. His skin is brown. Skin or fur? He moves forward. Lowers his head and settles his shoulders into a posture of respect.

  The lesser bucks snort as well. One dances. Orr’s heels ache to dance back. He does it, a little three-step gambol. The largest buck meets his eyes, twitches his nose, and runs. Orr chases, muscles straining, body singing, foot to hoof to bone to antler into the dark wood.

  13

  The

  Supertask

  Iph is on her knees on the porch of the cottage, Orr’s striped leggings in her hands. She doesn’t have to search the house to know that he has left to run with the deer. She buries her face in the gross leggings and lets loose. And suddenly, someone is nosing under her elbow. Someone is squirming into her lap. A wet nose pushes her hands away and a soft little tongue licks up her tears.

  By some miracle, here is Scout. And George, who says nothing, just holds her, which is the exact right thing. Scout barks, and Iph looks up to see Lorna and Cait and Josh and Plum and the members of the Furies carrying their instruments through the gate.

  “How?” Iph is laughing. The relief of them. The reality of them! If she is delusional, it’s a shared hallucination. Introductions are made. Then explanations.

  “It was this one,” Jane says, scooping up Scout. “She started howling like a little werewolf.”

  “She totally did,” George says. “Good thing we don’t have to worry about being quiet anymore.”

  “She made us all get off our asses and get in the car,” Josh says. “We figured she wanted to come find you.”

  “Dude,” Allison says. “What is this place? We were on the path, and then it was like the path was never there. I didn’t even have any of that tea last night.”

  “Well, it’s a fairy-tale cottage in an enchanted wood,” Plum says. “I mean, obviously.”

  Everyone laughs at that and goes inside, exclaiming over the cottage. Plum hangs back, picks up the leggings.

  “He was here?”

  “Here and gone,” Iph says. “He slept for a long time. I meant to watch him, but I fell asleep myself.”

  “Did you, like, touch the antlers?” Plum looks exhausted.

  “They’re really there,” Iph says. “I mean, if you’re losing it, I am, too.”

  “What should we do?”

  “I have an idea, but he needs to come back firs
t.”

  Plum nods. “I’m assuming there’s an awesome bathroom in there?”

  Iph laughs. “If you don’t come out in an hour, I’ll assume you decided to move in.”

  “I’m just going to pee,” Plum says, oddly forthright. “I brought my tarot cards. I think I’d better take a look.”

  Iph sits still again, like maybe if she doesn’t move Orr will come back.

  Scout sidles into her lap, a warm dose of chamomile tea in dog form, nosing her and meeting her eyes. There is so much awareness there. Iph’s been too busy mooning over George to notice.

  George comes out of the house with a glass of water for each of them and a little bowl for Scout. They drink.

  “I missed you,” George says.

  “I missed you, too.” Iph runs her hand over the shaved part of George’s head, which is nearly as soft as the velvet around Orr’s antlers.

  Orr’s antlers.

  Scout makes a playful little growl-bark and picks up the leggings in her mouth. She shakes them and drops them at Iph’s feet. Iph gets it. “I don’t want you going out there alone, girl.”

  George offers Iph a hand. So warm. Scout presses next to her on the other side. The pair of them make her strong enough to think this through. “She wants to go get him,” Iph says.

  “If anyone here can bring him back, it’s probably her.”

  “Aren’t you worried?”

  George crouches down to look Scout in the eyes. “Are you sure?”

  Scout whines, spins in a circle, and sits. Waiting for George’s word.

  George puts the leggings under Scout’s nose once more. “This is him.”

  Scout inhales and sits again.

  “Okay!” George says.

  Before the word is out of George’s mouth, Scout shoots out of the cottage and into the trees.