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After I watched Friday the 13th, I tweeted at Nate, did you know about this and not tell me, and he said he didn’t know and hadn’t seen it, but he did know of a Friday the 13th video game whose semi-open world is a virtual version of ours, calling to mind Pinedo’s argument: “The postmodern horror genre constructs an unstable, open-ended universe in which categories collapse, violence constitutes everyday life, and the irrational prevails.” I’m downloading the game. I think I should play as Jason, the one born where I was born.
But the installation isn’t working. I gather my sunglasses, keys, and money and head out into my real Ohio world, a place where I have no history and my senses are still learning the blade slap of surveilling police choppers, the twitter of sunrise songbirds, the bacterial fetor of sewer that rises from the lawn. The flat horizon holds none of the mysteries that teem in ridges and thick dark places. How am I supposed to live, not knowing where the ghosts are, where my murder will happen, where my corpse will be left? I could be murdered anywhere, really, because that’s where the men live, but that truth was easy to ignore when I was blithe and rosy in that made-up land where I might have been dreaming, might have been playing pretend, might have been nothing more than a man’s imagining.
4. When you don’t understand the meaning of something you read, whose fault is it? Yours or the writer’s? It has to be someone’s fault. Everything does. Anyway, I just ask because this is my book. Do you think I understand everything in this book? If I don’t, can you?
5. For more about these tribes and the state of New Jersey’s rescinding and reaffirming of state recognition, I recommend the work of Lenape and Nanticoke journalist Lisa J. Ellwood.
ACT II.
FOUR OF CUPS.
A person sits under a tree, arms crossed, legs crossed. A hand reaches from a cloud to extend a cup. The person looks down in refusal. Three cups stand upright in the grass.
TEN OF SWORDS.
A person lies facedown on the ground with ten swords plunged into their bleeding body through a red cloth. Distant blue mountains form a horizon under yellow sky that, above the clouds, becomes darkness.
THE TOWER.
Against black sky, a mountaintop tower burns, struck by the yellow arrow of a lightning bolt. A crown flies off the fire-engulfed top; two people fall upside down through the air—they may be the two depicted on the card preceding this in the major arcana, THE DEVIL, but they’re clothed. Smoke billows. Flames rise from windows.
BEGINNING A NARRATIVE IS EASY. But the hook becomes distant. The middle needs rising action. The protagonist should try to solve the initial problem but just make things worse. Antagonistic forces are at work, external and internal. Things get complicated, ideally. A subplot might develop. The protagonist must grow and change to overcome new obstacles. This cannot be a comfortable time, or else the narrative will slow and sag; it must be filled with threats.
Dramatic structure seems most possible when story time is linear. In this book, time is folding, looping, told by a clock’s minute hand advancing and retreating. If I stretched my life’s events onto a triangle diagram of narrative tension, what would the climax be? The rising action culminates there; it has nowhere else to go. Everything has built toward this breaking point, some crisis or confrontation. Then act two should end with the protagonist at the lowest low, the worst loss, the dark night of the soul.
This book is a narrative. It has an arc. But the tension is not in what happened when I lived it; it’s in what happened when I wrote it. Like I already told you, this is not just a recounted story; I am trying to make something happen and record the process and results. What about this, then: the scientific method:
1. Make an observation.
2. Ask a question.
3. Research.
4. Construct a hypothesis, or testable guess, extending beyond the available information.
5. Experiment to test the hypothesis.
6. Analyze the data.
7. Communicate the results and formed conclusions.
I recently saw a pencil pouch claim SCIENCE IS MAGIC THAT WORKS. Okay. I have an observation: my reality is pain. A question: What is real, anyway? Research: there is more of that to do, and my hypothesis is undetermined at this time. Science feels so limited. Can I experiment if I know too little to guess the outcome?
An experiment is a kind of narrative, a story outlined before it’s written. The climax of an experiment comes at the reckoning with results. But this is not that part. I haven’t even made a mess yet. This is the part where I circle the shore of a lake and walk the riverbank. Where I keep leaving and then become a dry place all my own. This part is a map, and I lose it.
WHITE CITY
All my life,
since I was ten,
I’ve been waiting
to be in
this hell here
with you;
all I’ve ever
wanted, and
still do.
—Alice Notley
If a man was never to lie to me. Never lie me.
I swear I would never leave him.
—Louise Erdrich, “The Strange People”6
MADISON PARK BEACH
The first time my future self visited me—flesh, not metaphor—I was close to the part of Lake Washington where a'yahos, a serpent spirit, once lived in and above the water. I wasn’t seeking anything but a bus ride home. I didn’t trek into the mountains or wait for the sunrise to address me. I missed it altogether, having been up late with whiskey. I didn’t burn cedar or call upon the ancestors. I slumped post-drunk in my bus seat and beseeched my liver to forgive me again while a woman passed in front of me wearing a wool cape, a medical mask, and black-framed glasses like mine.
She stepped onto the stairs, looked at me, and froze. I could see my reflection in the glass between us. I saw her see it, too: ten years separated us, but we were two variations on a single body. She stepped off the bus and onto the grass above the beach.
This was in Madison Park, where I lived from age twenty-five to thirty until escaping north to the suburbs. I first touched its beach on the evening of Seattle’s hottest day in recent memory. My friends swam but I was afraid of something—maybe the display of my body, maybe leaving my keys on the shore—so I sat and looked at the night: city glitter across the lake, patterns of wakeboat disturbance, condo boxes, white bodies sailing off the high dive. I knew I could become a thriving person by throwing my body into the land the way these white people threw themselves into it, certain the land would give and they would not break. A month later, I moved to Madison Park.
SEATTLE FAULT
The Seattle Fault cuts across Puget Sound, through downtown and central Seattle, and across Lake Washington. A'yahos lived at a few places along the fault, including a spot near Madison Park. This monster would change shape from an enormous double-headed horned serpent to a deer-snake. It caused landslides and tore the earth. Not all monsters are monstrosities; some help hold the world in order. This one did. In every source I have seen, it’s written about in the past tense. I’m guessing colonizers drove it out.
I am not Duwamish, so the story of this power isn’t mine and I don’t know how to tell it. Even within my own tribe, people from a little ways south, I’m a young person learning how to live, so I make space for silence. I never disclose everything. Most of our seen world has been colonized. While we work to regain it, we protect the unseen from encroachment, from being stolen and mangled.
Since I have no authority in telling the story of this place, I don’t write this to inform. I do it for myself, to make sense of the unseen world through rumination so I might be good here.
A'yahos is already known to white people, especially after a burst of journalistic speculation about whether Seattle would be leveled by an earthquake. Kathryn Schulz’s New Yorker article “The Really Big One” struck fear into Seattleites’ hearts, with a regional FEMA administrator’s quote excerpted all over Facebook:
“Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”
I didn’t pay attention to much of the article because I don’t worry about death by natural disaster, but I did notice Schulz mentioned one of my all-time favorite seismological articles: “Ruth Ludwin, then a seismologist at the University of Washington, together with nine colleagues, collected and analyzed Native American reports of earthquakes and saltwater floods. Some of those reports contained enough information to estimate a date range for the events they described.” This study, “Dating the 1700 Cascadia Earthquake: Great Coastal Earthquakes in Native Stories,” was the site of my first textual encounter with a'yahos. It should be read alongside my very favorite seismological article, “Serpent Spirit-power Stories along the Seattle Fault,” written by a group of coauthors whose roles and affiliations are noted at the bottom of the first page:
R. S. Ludwin (Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington), C. P. Thrush (Program on the Environment and Department of History, University of Washington), K. James (anthropologist), D. Buerge (historian), C. Jonientz-Trisler (FEMA), J. Rasmussen (Duwamish Tribe cultural resources expert), K. Troost (Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington), and A. de los Angeles (Snoqualmie Tribe cultural resources expert and great-grandson of James Zackuse, Duwamish Indian doctor).
I could have picked up the pace by compressing the above to “Ruth Ludwin and seven colleagues,” but I can’t gloss over a fact I must convey before I continue: this research was a collaborative process involving the consensual sharing of Duwamish knowledge by those with the authority to do so. What I know about a'yahos comes from this citable article, meant to be accessed.
The authors write of four Seattle locations associated with a'yahos, one of which is by Lake Washington’s shore near Madison Park. Around 1,100 years ago, landslides and earth-shaking struck just north of the a'yahos site along the fault. “Throughout the region, individuals sought personal spirit powers to guide their lives and bring them luck and skill. A'yahos was one of the most powerful of these personal spirit powers, though it was also malevolent, dangerous, and possibly fatal to encounter,” and its power could be used only by certain people.
After the publication of the New Yorker article, other outlets responded with their own earthquake angles. David Bressan’s Forbes article about a'yahos begins:
Oral tradition played—and still plays—an important role in many societies. The subjects of these stories range from fantastic fairy tales to myths, tales based on real persons, places or historic events. But interestingly enough, these stories may also represent attempts to record and transfer knowledge of past geological catastrophes as a warning from generation to generation.
He writes that a'yahos “haunted” boulders in and around Seattle. Myths, hauntings, tales: this language makes me uncomfortable, corralling Indigenous knowledges into the realm of fantasy and lore, but still, the article’s aim is right: settlers would’ve known about earthquake dangers earlier if they’d listened to Indigenous peoples. Settlers have always lived in a world shaped by forces that are known, understood, and described, just not by them.
MADISON COURT APARTMENTS
I believed that if I lived by the beach, I would be on vacation all the time, even though I knew it was wrong to think that. Mountain Lake was a resort community before I was born. Life never became a vacation there; life was hard, simply because I found it challenging to do the basic work of being a person interacting with other people and wishing to be comforted in some vague way that seemed best expressed by the songs the radio host Delilah played on her nighttime request and dedication show, everything with a dedication declaring the love the nuns at school called agape: unconditional, true. My parents loved me unconditionally, but my brain still screamed.
Like every other place I’d inhabited, I expected Madison Park to bring me contentment. This was why it was established. I failed to find my ease there because deep in the mystery inside me, I wanted the opposite.
MADISON PARK
The city of Seattle is situated in a violent place where land bucks against ocean, tectonic shifting sends chills across the earth’s skin, and volcanoes spill lava onto glacier-bitten crust. For the past 2.5 million years, tectonics and glaciation shaped the folded, jutting, sloping land currently referred to as the Pacific Northwest. Sixteen thousand years ago, the last glacier left what’s now Seattle. Then people began to live there. Duwamish creation stories tell of a world recovering from an ice age. The Changer (or Transformer) arrived, eventually bringing warmth, allowing for the arrival of salmon and cedar. The Changer’s capsizing of the world turned some beings into immortals, some into humans.
People lived in villages and camps along the rivers that drained into the sound, and these communities came together through marriage, ceremony, and other gatherings. Now, those people from the lower Duwamish River and the land that is now Seattle are known as the Duwamish people. Many were removed from their homes and relocated to the Muckleshoot and Suquamish Reservations, though some families remained on their land and maintained Duwamish self-governance and traditions. The Duwamish Tribe is not federally recognized despite its resilience through systematic destruction of communities, food-gathering places, and centers of ceremony. In 2001, at the very end of his presidency, Clinton granted recognition; not even two days later, Bush rescinded it.
White people began passing through now-Seattle in the late 1700s and began settlement in the 1850s. In 1864, Judge John J. McGilvra bought 420 acres east of the village center. He cut through the wilderness from town to his parcel, creating a straight-shot road that would become Madison Street. He eventually divided up land for cottages and developed the waterfront. His vision: a lakefront resort and amusement park. Vision executed: the Music Palace of Washington with its five turrets and seating for hundreds. Visitors drank beer and listened to John Philip Sousa marches. Opera performers threw villains off barges. An unnamed baseball team with no mascot played afternoon games. If pioneer families brought enough supplies in their wagons, they could stay all summer in the judge’s “Tent City.”
A world’s fair came to Seattle in 1909. Madison Park got a makeover, a turreted pavilion gate, amusement rides, and a new name: White City. The carnival had a roller coaster, a Ferris wheel, sideshow oddities, and a miniature train so popular with adults that kids missed out. By 1913, White City was gone, and the long-term buzzkill of Prohibition soon set in.
LAKE WASHINGTON
I did move there for permanent vacation, but also because my boyfriend, Henry, lived south of Madison Park in a lakefront apartment with moorage for his wakeboat. We had dated for a year. I wanted to be close to him. He did terrible things to me. It’s possible he’d disagree. Many people don’t want to believe their bodies’ wants are violent. I would not believe the liquor I loved was scouring my insides and wasting my outsides, because it was the only thing helping me forget I wasn’t safe.
Colonization is not a metaphor for my body and I do not present what has happened to my body as a metaphor for colonization. But the violence done to my body was facilitated by colonization: dominance is central to the American creation story. White men’s violent rule over brown bodies built this young nation. By telling stories over and over, we give them life. By enacting narratives over and over, we give them shape. A white man dominates a Native woman and keeps his world in order.
A metaphor makes an analogue of two unrelated things with shared characteristics; a metonym is a figure of speech in which something is referred to by the name of something associated with it. But neither of those fits because I can’t name what Henry did. I’m still in gaps between phrases forming, stalled in sense memories I pivot from as soon as they return. The images inside me behave as boundaries in the way white people think of rivers. I come right up to the edge. In the deep place, my body is in his bed in the apartment hanging over the lake. If I let you in—what happens if I let you in?
WATERFRONT, DOWNTOWN SEATTLE
In 1854, Duwamish Chief Si'ahl (commonly known now as Chief Seattle) gave a speech shortly before white people took his people’s lands. Knowledge of his speech has been maintained through Indigenous oral traditions, but his words didn’t enter the non-Native record until more than thirty years later, when Henry A. Smith printed his version of the speech in the Seattle Sunday Star, conjured up from records and memory.
Smith said Seattle said, “The great, and I presume also good, white chief sends us word that he wants to buy our lands but is willing to allow us to reserve enough to live on comfortably. This indeed appears generous, for the red man no longer has rights that he need respect, and the offer may be wise, also, for we are no longer in need of a great country.”
Smith said Seattle said, “It matters but little where we pass the remainder of our days.”
Smith said Seattle said—most quotably—“And when the last red man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among white men shall have become a myth, these shores shall swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children shall think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway or in the silence of the woods they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night, when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent, and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone.”
White Magic Page 12
