White Magic

by Elissa Washuta

  The conservatory tweeted that the flower would probably open overnight. This made sense: a solar eclipse was happening that night, and if a pubescent plant was going to bloom for the first time, I figured it would want to do it on the solar eclipse that astrology Twitter was waiting for. I returned the next day before going to the bridge, but the flower hadn’t opened.

  On the phone a few days after our breakup, when I told him I hoped we’d be together again someday, Carl said, “We don’t know what’s going to happen.” Maybe that was true for him, but I was going to know. I burned candles to ask spirits for protection, tracked the transiting sun and moon around the zodiac wheel to see change-bringing eclipses ahead, and asked my tarot deck the same question too many times. I wanted to see every change coming so I could harden myself into a landform.

  On my last day in the tower, I stayed late to watch the sun go down. I’d never been in that office after five. Red sky at night, sailors’ delight, my mom has always said; pink clouds lingered above the tree line beyond Salmon Bay. I felt okay. The bridge’s shaking sent my hard hat to the edge of the desk and then onto the floor with a bang. I began to cry because I was going to miss that place, and I never wanted to have to miss anything. You are human, a friend texted the night before when I told him I couldn’t stop missing Carl. Humans miss.

  When it got dark outside, I didn’t turn on a lamp. My hands were illuminated by the blue, pink, and yellow of Rapunzel’s line-rendered shape, bright and constant, her arm never moving away from its protective stance across her body. Maybe she and her long hair knew more than she wanted to, more than she thought she could take.

  A reporter had interviewed me earlier that day. We talked about bridge sounds: constant car traffic, boat horns and bridge operator responses, bells signaling openings. The quietest moments came when traffic stood still, the bells stopped, and the bridge’s pieces soundlessly separated. How interesting, she said, that the largest movement is the quietest.

  The opening: one smooth deck suddenly two; joined pieces showing they were never fastened; counterbalance obscured beneath, in the place too dangerous for free access. The bridge, for a few seconds, was no longer a path, its halves pitched as steep as a cliff’s face, and as a boat passed under, stopped motorists were made to remember that the reason for a bridge is the water.

  The opening: the corpse flower’s blossom never did. Its progress stopped sometime around the eclipse; the flower died and began decomposition. Gardeners thought the young plant may not have stored enough energy to go through with a full blooming.

  It didn’t open, but did it really not bloom? Local news outlets announced it was blooming. The conservatory did, too, and I thought what I saw was the whole spectacle because I’d never known the full onslaught of that big petal peeled open, red and pungent as a rotting heart. The plant made its flower but kept it shielded. Did all that count for nothing?

  In Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle, Matthew Klingle writes, “It is the singular pride of humans to place themselves at the center of the universe they did not alone create.”

  By the time I returned my tower keys to the bridge operator, I didn’t feel I had made a complete thing. I hadn’t realized I’d be attempting to tell the story of the entire known and unknown world. I am not a historian. I could use only the tools I had: texts and pain. I wanted to tell a story that would link the present and the past, but to what end? Does the collecting of details get me any closer to meaning? What is my research question? How will I know when I’m done? Have your people suffered hardships because they have been forced away from their own country, with no place to go? What can you tell us about your project and why it’s important? When a spirit gets eaten, who eats it? Why do we want the universe to have a center?

  Traveling along my research questions, I went off course and ended up in no-place, a hole, right where I needed to be. At the end, I finally had the words for a starting point: my belief that the settlers desecrated the land and disrupted Duwamish life, and at the same time, that the settlers could never destroy Duwamish life or the power in the land.

  The Bridge of the Gods, like the Aurora Bridge, was built using cantilevers, anchored on a side and projecting horizontally into space from there; both bridges have trusses for additional support. Tension, compression—metaphor is too easy. Easier to avoid the full dive into understanding the bridge and how it works, skipping right to the meaning I want. What I understand: Tatoosh, the Thunderbird, used to live in the river, terrorizing everybody, bringing in storms, shooting lightning from his eye. And I understand this: the original Bridge of the Gods, the land formation, was made when two brothers fought over love. They threw boulders at each other and flung fire, laying waste to the land, and their shaking opened a deep hole. The woman they wanted hid in a cave. The Great Spirit had placed a bridge over the river, and with the brothers’ earth-shaking, it fell, land in water.

  What purpose do metaphors serve? Adding texture and vividness. Making the abstract concrete. Disrupting the familiar through proximity with the unfamiliar. And to what end? The bridge fell into the river and blocked it, but the river broke through. I’m stalled here. I can’t stop the metaphors that make themselves because all my language, all my structures, are built—see?—on mechanisms that want to span the distance between one thing and another thing and join them in the mind. When something reverberates with meaning beyond itself, it can break through obstructions and make new routes. I have lost my land, my language, a thousand choices that should have been mine to make. But I have these felt connections, nearly supernatural, one thing transformed into another. Metaphor doesn’t always cheapen things by turning them into devices in service of clarity or art: it can point to relationships between the spirits in everything.

  A small creek once entered Salmon Bay, the stretch of the canal that was as far west as I could see from the tower. The creek was called spәdak, “a kind of supernatural power,” and through it, people could go to the underworld to meet their guardian spirits. By the beach of the bay, in what’s now downtown, there was once a little hole in the ground that served as a portal to the creek. Baby whales and turtles passed through it to get to the lake.

  When I dug into the ground with my hands and buried scraps of paper in the small hole, everything changed. I can’t name the spirit I met because I don’t know what it was.

  A voice in my head said, Do you trust me?

  Yes, I trust you, I thought back.

  My world turned over.

  9. Do you think this is a good book? How do you know? Is it because you compared it to other books? I do want to make you uncomfortable if you’re accustomed to being the ideal audience, your wants prioritized. This is how I treat so many of the people I get close to: I try to give them exactly what they want in some ways, withhold in others. Can you love a person even if you don’t understand them? Or: How much do you have to understand someone in order to love them? Does one have anything to do with the other at all?

  10. Along the lakes, rivers, and sound were more villages and significant sites than I can elegantly list in these sentences with no map. For an extensive annotated list of significant places, see “An Atlas of Indigenous Seattle” by Coll Thrush and Nile Thompson, with maps by Amir Sheikh, which appears as a kind of appendix to Thrush’s Native Seattle.

  11. I’ve edited the story, too, to clarify original text by changing two archaic terms to camas and Raccoon.

  ACT III.

  THE MAGICIAN.

  A person in white and red robes stands behind an altar, one arm raising a baton, the other pointing at the ground. On the altar lie a cup, pentacle, sword, and wand. Red roses, white lilies, and green leaves fill the top and bottom of the frame. An infinity symbol floats over the magician’s head.

  THE EMPRESS.

  A person in a white robe patterned with red and green fruit sits on a plush pillow atop red cloth, one arm raising a scepter, the other resting on her knee. Under her seat lies a heart ma
rked with the Venus symbol. Evergreens, a leafy tree, and a stream are behind her, gold wheat at her feet, a crown of stars on her head.

  THE WORLD.

  A person, nude but for the wrapping of a pale ribbon, holds batons in both hands and floats in blue-sky space, ringed by a leafy laurel. Red ribbons wrap the laurel, forming infinity symbols. In each corner, there’s a disembodied head on a cloud: person, eagle, bull, lion.

  IF YOUR BODY IS FEELING the arc, you know what’s ahead: our narrator faces the monster in a final showdown. Act three is for crisis, climax, resolution, and dénouement, meaning unknotting.

  Eight years ago, I began this book as a drawn line marked by plot points. I outlined a novel about a girl who turns into a shark. When I realized the girl was me, I drew a new line, but I didn’t know where to put the only plot point I had: the narrator sees herself from the future. I wrote messes and disappeared them into hard drive folders. I downloaded articles about ghosts and intergenerational trauma. But I couldn’t write a book, because a book is the dénouement of a problem worked through in life. I had to descend into the gloom, the underworld. Writing a book is living out the final battle, a long face-off with what my mind has resisted resolving because it feels safe in the pain.

  I suppose I should tell you where I am now, and by where, I really mean when, or maybe where is right—the location of this narrative present. Where: I am in Ohio, in my attic. The date is October 6, 2019. I have written and arranged the book, and now I am passing through, sentence by sentence, to tighten and unify. I know what happens next because for me, that’s over. For you, it’s not.

  While revising, I made a Google map of all the important places in these pages and saw points nearly on top of each other, ringing the Salish Sea: fictional worlds, filmed worlds, the spirit world from which a'yahos emerged, the world called “Seattle” I lived in from 2007 to 2017. I needed a better form than a story, an experiment, or a map. I needed to build a memory palace, a set of mental rooms filled with images, a route to travel through it. But the memory palace was outside me, in the land and the calendar, the seasons dragging through both.

  The problem with a narrative is that it must end. I knew, in the last year of writing, that I was cursed with a blockage and would not find love until I finished this narrative. I felt myself traveling toward the final time loop’s exit, or close to solving a riddle. I thought I had solved it by believing there was nothing greater than my assemblage of patterns. That wasn’t right, but it worked, because even though the solution was wrong, the block was lifted, the gate opened, and I was dismissed, as though walking out of a cave.

  The day I left the time loops, I was in an old fort on the Salish Sea, in barracks repurposed as state park visitor housing, sitting in a first-floor bedroom while a doe sat outside my window and watched me work.

  When I finished the draft, I felt it: resolution. I could stop hexing myself with cursed names. The book ended but I continued, and the next day, my world turned over. The symbols and synchronicities had appeared when I was looking to be convinced by magic, but they made their sense and disappeared, leaving space for a real person. He came to me two days after a lunar eclipse, four weeks before Venus met the sun and plunged into the underworld. He came to me two years after he came to live in Seattle, right where the I-5 bridge spans the ship canal, just as I was about to leave without having met him yet. He came to me under meteors, atop a cliff, at the Salish Sea beach where Salish canoes had just landed and left. When he came, we walked up a path to a forest clearing filled with poems on tall slabs and a concrete vault that once held battle plans, now empty. Two concrete thrones, empty.

  But I have to stop before the narrative reaches that confluence point where the symbols gather to resolve themselves. My own resolution arrived without them. I, arranger, am changed by having written these essays, and I come to you from a narrative present beyond them, but also still embedded in them. I have asked my body to suffer a little more. My disorder demands that I feel the past in my body, like a medium channeling spirit. The reliving is an illusion, because I am safe now, but still, my hair is falling out, my legs ache and tingle with the pain and pressure of displeased nerves, my mouth sprouts canker sores, and my inflamed hips weep. My body props up the stakes of this book by summoning ghosts. It is time to finish this and exorcise the last of them.

  Now I am the magician. For my finale, I will try to make you feel the wonder I felt. Spectators feel the greatest delight when they don’t know how an effect was achieved. What is your tolerance for ambiguity? Stay with me. For you, I will perform the final trick, the magician’s unknotting of the wrist-binding rope, the dénouement.

  MY HEARTBREAK WORKBOOK

  Understanding the nature of your wound is the key to your healing, for it has affected all your behavior, your decisions, and your life choices, especially in the arena of intimate relationships. It is the healing of our wounds that we seek, consciously or not, in committed relationships.

  —Harville Hendrix, PhD, Keeping the Love You Find: A Personal Guide

  THE INTERNET SAYS NOBODY WILL love me until I learn to love myself, but the internet never gives instructions. I told myself, “I love you,” but I was thinking, You’re the worst. Nothing would change my mind. What a terrible impasse. The bookstore self-help section, though, said something different: nobody will love me until I engage in sequential self-exploration exercises. Harville Hendrix’s self-help book for wounded singles says there is a riddle wrapped around my heart. I have a highlighter, a composition book, and a pen. I have time. I do not have any better ideas.

  The self-help book says the brain turns all that has happened to us into points. From the points, it makes patterns. The book says the collected memories are like pixels in a digital image we store of the only person we believe can close the wound.

  The last few years have been like this: a cord of twined images of white boys with plastic glasses and plaid shirts and bad posture and two-thirds-full pints on outdoor bar tables. My finger presses into a flattened mouth to pull it left or right. I could build a man in my sleep. Look:

  Whiskey and IPAs. Snowboarding is my life. Been single for a while now due to avoidance of drama but I’m ready to put myself back out there for the right girl. Nice guy, not a serial killer, lol. Looking for my partner in crime.

  Bourbon and scotch. The kid is my niece. Just moved back to the northwest. Taking applications for a travel companion. Enjoy a healthy and active lifestyle. I have near perfect straight teeth for never having braces, and have no clue why I don’t smile with my teeth.

  Craft beer enthusiast. Not here for hookups. Podcasts, adventures, movies, guitars, hiking, whiskey, dogs, Star Wars, sushi, snack plates, coffee, wine, motorcycles, dancing, drinks, travel, positive vibes, minimalism, bacon, passion. Looking for a discreet lover. Must be fit and in shape. I want us to be like an old Nintendo console: blow on it hard and shove it back in the slot.

  School of Hard Knocks, University of Life. 6'1" if it matters. Poly dude with a big heart. I want to beat you at pool. Caring, compassionate, level-headed, drama-free, honest, loyal, humble, passionate, easygoing, funny, adventure-seeking, and so on. Looking for a wife to start a family colony.

  420 friendly. I love the outdoors. I am that serial killer you have been looking for lol jk. I enjoy meeting people and going out and trying new things. I like to be active but also enjoy staying in. “Follow your passion, be prepared to work hard and sacrifice, and above all, don’t let anyone limit your dreams.” Must love dogs, be low maintenance and love hiking.

  Living every day like it’s my last. I like beautiful smiles. I’m a good guy. Good job. Not an asshole. I love exotic women, and different cultures. What’s your fantasy?

  Growing old, but never up. Dream big. Work hard. Die living.

  It’s like a game, each match as dopamine-rich as a sunk Skee-Ball: Congratulations! You have a new match.

  The self-help book says that when I read it, I’m like a mystery solv
er. The hurts I can’t get out of my head are clues. People, places, dates, and times: I fill my dossier. Somewhere in the sheaf, between my troubles and attempts to fix them, I will find myself.

  When I was fourteen, riding the bus home from school, a boy asked me if he could cut open my chest, pry apart my rib cage with his hands, and rip out my heart.

  “Sure,” I said, so he’d like me.

  He looked so much like my celebrity crush that he could’ve been his doppelgänger. His name was Salvador, and he was one in a long line of the boys and men I called upon to save me. Not the first or the last, not the worst, not the source, just another crush.

  He said he was going to wait to open my rib cage. He said it’s much easier to pry apart a rib cage than you’d think. I started thinking of him as the incubus, something I found on the internet. At night, I kept my bedroom window open and hoped he wouldn’t come in with the spring air, boy turned demon, broad shoulders as vessels for the unfurling of wings.

  I stood at the door to the woodshop classroom and watched his hands. If he had opened my chest, he would have found the hole, bigger than a heart and a stomach. I thought it was an organ, maybe the soul I had learned about in Catholic school and imagined as a limp gray sac. The hole had always been there, and when I was little, I filled it with Cadbury Creme Eggs. In high school, I used it as a hiding place for the NyQuil I drank from the Gatorade bottle in my locker. Later, I would keep all sorts of things in the hole: whiskey, Vicodin, cheese, a butterfly knife, Nintendo games, teeth, boxed wine, antipsychotics, condoms. Salvador was expelled for knocking over a soda machine and threatening to kill us all.