White Magic

by Elissa Washuta

  At the college, I read an essay about how I’ve got a hole inside of me, a hole that’s really a portal. All these people watch me, but I only pretend to look back, instead seeing through them. A mismatch of attention, a cut current. Someone shows me I’ve been reading to a carved sculpture, Man Who Married an Eagle by John Hoover, a triptych with hinged doors opening and shutting over a figure that looks like a portal. The piece is based on a story I don’t know, the design reminiscent of Northwest Coast transformation masks that open in ceremony. The figure has two faces, one embedded in the body of the other. Which is the man and which is the wife?

  5-23-18

  Both love spell candles are burning strangely, hollowing themselves out, with the faces standing up like masks, then peeling forward and flopping toward their chests. I’m supposed to burn the candles over seven days, but in minutes, the ELISSA candle burns down far and its red wax spills onto the mantel. The figure’s face and chest lie supine in the puddle. I decide the TRUE LOVE candle should be burned down tonight, too. It takes hours; along the way to the bottom, this candle’s face and torso, in a move that defies all sense, leap across the puddle to land parallel to the other torso, as though they’re lying in bed, talking. When the flames die, I try to read the wax. I see a mess.

  Not yet, the wax says. Whoever he is, he’s not ready.

  5-27-16

  “I only want to be with you,” I say, meaning, I don’t want you to be with anyone else, so it’s good that Carl says, “That’s what I want too.”

  He’s inside me when I tell him I love him. He can hardly say it fast enough—“I love you too, I love you so much.”

  Later, our sides pressed together, I ask, “What if they could stitch us together by our rib cages? I would do it. I would be sewn into you.” This is not the same as saying I love you. It’s more accurate.

  5-30-16

  Carl is going on tour for weeks in the Midwest. I take him and his guitars to the airport. When I pull up at the curb and stop the car, I look at him and know that on the other side of this, everything is going to be different.

  6-4-16

  A few weeks ago, I tore a pretty medicine cabinet out of the wall in a building I’d once worked in that was about to be demolished. I’ve always liked the medicine cabinet; now it’s propped up on my microwave, attached to the wall with enough heavy-duty Command Strips that it’s not going to move. Except, tonight, it does: while I’m standing at the kitchen window, wondering what Carl is doing and whether he’s going to text me tonight, the cabinet practically jumps off the wall toward me, all my witchcraft supplies inside spilling all over the black and white tile of the kitchen floor. I tweet, The emoji I really need is a serious ghost that is not making a funny face. Then I tweet, The emoji I need is not a cat that is crying or laughing but is just existing the way we all do: in intermittent pain. And I want an emoji that is not a pile of shit with a smile on it, but a pile of everyone who has ever rejected me with its face covered in loss. And The emoji I need is not a bumblebee taking flight but a baby bumblebee eating the corpse of a male bumblebee killed by copulation. And Carl, still, is silent.

  6-4-17

  In order to be happy, people say, I’m supposed to like being alone with myself. People also say one shouldn’t look to one’s partner to fulfill all needs. I wish I could be entirely absent from myself for a while. I get close by walking for hours. Today, I walk alone through grim, drizzly Reykjavík to the edge of the ocean, where I will dine alone. I eat my sous vide arctic char and sea beans while I read a book that was probably meant as décor. I learn about shark meat, a traditional Icelandic food with origins in starvation times. The raw meat is too toxic to eat, but when it’s fermented, dried, and rotted, the decay detoxifies the flesh. Fishermen could once sell the meat of sharks caught while fishing for other species, but now, they must toss the dead sharks back into the sea.

  Across the ocean, my parents are at the supermarket fish counter, where they see a species they haven’t known the store to carry: arctic char. We eat it together in time, apart in space, but I don’t know that yet. I walk back thinking about dead sharks in the water, caught by somebody who wanted something else.

  6-5-16

  What is he doing? I tweet, I need an emoji that is not a starry sky but a diorama of my anxiety nightmares. Carl doesn’t text. I tweet:

  The emoji I need is not a chipmunk holding an acorn but a chipmunk holding the beating heart of its enemy.

  The emoji I need is not an arrow over the word SOON but instead an arrow over the words NEVER SOON ENOUGH.

  The emoji I need is not the sun peeking out from behind a cloud but the sun peeking out from behind my overwhelming fear of scarcity.

  The emoji I need is not a smiling frog but a representation of the years of therapy that gave that frog the tools it uses for anxiety.

  The emoji I need is not a dove holding an olive branch but a dove holding one page on which I’ve written all my secrets.

  The emoji I need is a pretty good likeness of my dread, which looks basically like a set of extracted wisdom teeth.

  The emoji I need is not a smiling moon but a moon that is always afraid of asking a stupid question.

  The emoji I need is not a disembodied dragon head but a beheaded dragon body so I can find out whether its efficacy is in the brain or heart.

  6-8-17

  On the way to Carl’s show, which I should not go to, I’m stopped by a man on the redbrick sidewalk in front of the community college. He wants to show me a magic trick. “You look familiar,” I say. “Do I know you?” He doesn’t want to talk about it. He wants to show me this card trick. I’m game. It’s a good trick, so when he asks for money, I give him some. “Don’t you love surprises?” he says.

  After the show, Carl and I go to the diner across the street and eat tater tots. The fireplace flames are reflected in his glasses, just like the shot of a shady character in a Twin Peaks episode I watched the other day. “You’re the devil,” I tell him. He says that he is. I don’t want to look into his eyes, but I can see through the flames.

  I excuse myself to the red-walled, black-and-white-chevron-floored bathroom, where I take a minute to think. Don’t I love surprises? What is it I love, who is it I love?

  6-9-18

  The Ohio air is so humid I feel like a fish in a tank. The whole room might fill with my tears. I hardly sleep anymore, and once afternoon settles onto my skin, I can’t get off the couch. “Something is missing and you have to find it,” the Log Lady told Deputy Hawk on the phone. That is the condition I am in. I don’t even know where to begin to look.

  I sometimes imagine getting in my car and driving far away, and today, I really do it, grabbing only my wallet and water and asking my phone to take me two hours south to Serpent Mound. If I don’t feel wonder at the sight of a thousands-of-years-old earthwork shaped like a snake eating the sun—maybe an egg—then I must be dead inside. Standing on a platform above the built earth, the curves’ shaping said to be an unsolvable mystery, I feel nothing.

  Twain, The Mysterious Stranger

  “Days and days went by now, and no Satan. It was dull without him.”

  6-15-1917

  Late at night, the first vehicle crossed the Fremont Bridge: an owl car, the night’s last trolley run.

  6-16-16

  My back hurts and I can’t dream. I’m in a forest cottage on a Salish Sea island, where I am to do nothing but write. Carl and his guitars are still in the Midwest. The quieter he gets on the phone, the louder the pond frogs bellow. I walk paths for hours, legs lashed by nettles, then come back to the desk where I write about things I’d forgotten: years ago, Henry’s fingernails digging into my cheeks, bursting pores, his thumb wiping away blood. His palm over my mouth in the night. There’s something I know happened over and over but I can only picture it as though I’m hung from his ceiling, watching him flip me over and tell me to just relax and let him fuck me in that hole that doesn’t want him.

  I r
arely thought about him until my sponsor, in a move I didn’t know went against all program wisdom, urged me to make amends to him for my drunken fight-instigating and my emotional affair with my best friend, Kevin. I didn’t think I should contact Henry; she didn’t think I could stay sober if I didn’t. So I met him at a restaurant by the lake, right where a'yahos once lived.

  He was late. His face was lopsided, swollen with infection around one eye, but his expression was unobscured: that smug smile when he’s got me pinched between two fingernails, he’s got my collarbone pinned under his oxen thighs. I apologized for psychic infidelity, picking fights, and getting drunk. He told me he was sorry he was mean to my cat. He used to pick her up by the scruff and throw her. He’d pour cold water on her head when she hid behind the toilet.

  Our history was lodged between my vertebrae, stiffening my back, when we sat by the lake and he told me he thought we should stay for dinner. After a conversation that felt as if I were pulling words from deep, small pockets between my bones, I sat in my car by the lake and texted a sober friend, I shouldn’t have seen him. This was the wrong thing to do.

  She wrote back, You’re right where you need to be.

  I was in the underworld. My corpse hung on a meat hook. I’ve spent the last two and a half months rotting.

  C. G. Jung, Tavistock Lecture I

  “We do not like to look at the shadow-side of ourselves; therefore there are many people in our civilized society who have lost their shadow altogether, they have got rid of it. They are only two-dimensional; they have lost the third dimension, and with it they have usually lost the body. The body is a most doubtful friend because it produces things we do not like; there are too many things about the body which cannot be mentioned. The body is very often the personification of this shadow of the ego. Sometimes it forms the skeleton in the cupboard, and everybody naturally wants to get rid of such a thing.”

  6-17-16

  At the end of the tour, Carl stops at his parents’ house, where he gets his birth certificate so he can send me his birth time and I can finally look at his natal chart and see how it fits with mine. The aspect lines drawn between planets look like stitches between rib cages. I already knew he was a Gemini, but now I know everything, or at least the appealing things I let myself see in his chart. His north node conjuncts my ascendant exactly, which the internet says means it was our destiny to meet. Actually, what it says is, “Was it your destiny to meet?”

  I email him a detailed explanation of the ways in which we are fated to be together forever. He doesn’t reply.

  My spine aches as though its cord snapped like cheap elastic string holding plastic beads. It’s the kind of pain that sounds an alarm.

  6-18-16

  On the way home from the woods, I cross the threshold into Carl’s living room, where he’d once stood like a portal rimmed by soft white light. Now, he’s limp and shifty-eyed when I wrap my arms around him.

  6-18-18

  I’m sitting in stopped freeway traffic when a coyote bolts down the shoulder. A dog that looks like a coyote. Drivers have parked their cars, left doors open, and are sprinting after this animal that has been running so fast against traffic that I don’t think he’ll ever be caught.

  It is 11:00 AM, one hundred degrees. I’m thinking about my memory of what sex feels like. I’m like the plants I put in the shitty backyard topsoil, limp and thirsty, wanting nutrients. Before I saw the coyote-dog running, I was thinking about my upcoming trip to Seattle and the possibility of texting Carl would you be down for a mercy fuck or maybe I’m considering asking you if you’d be down for a mercy fuck but this doesn’t mean I’ve decided yet that I want it, and then all of a sudden I was braking and an animal appeared.

  I’m going to the doctor because I can’t eat or sleep. There, the nurse is patient with my slow blood she drains into six vials. The doctor prescribes a pill and asks me if I’m getting any exercise. I tell her I’ve been cutting my lawn out of the ground with a knife.

  Back at home, I lie on the couch and listen to birds chirping in the chimney. Right behind the mantel where I burned the love spell candles, I hear flapping wings and a single note over and over. The internet says these are newborn chimney swifts, and though they are hungry and demanding to be fed, they’re right where they’re supposed to be, and I am lucky to have them.

  He’ll appear when I’m least expecting it, the internet says. I’m supposed to stop looking. I think the birds might beat the bricks from the wall with their unhappy wings. Don’t they know they’re supposed to be independent, not wanting or needing anything from anybody?

  6-19-16

  Back from the woods, I find the stove element on high again. A bag of chocolate chips in the cupboard has melted. Who are you? I wonder. What do you want me to know? I ask.

  Meder, “Doorways to the Other Side: Am I a Portal? Is My House a Portal?”

  Meder writes that not only places can be portals: people can, too. Certain events can open the soul, making a hole where a portal to other worlds can take shape within the person. I picture the heart as a cabinet with doors opening to a corridor.

  Twin Peaks

  MIKE appears to Agent Cooper in a dream and says, “Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see. One chants out between two worlds, Fire walk with me.”

  6-20-18

  I’m flying to Seattle, and I’ve decided not to see Carl. There is no point in trying to find the magic again. This morning, I could barely heave myself off the couch, lethargic from the humidity at the muggy confluence of two rivers.

  Now I am high above the land, reading Staniforth’s book, Here Is Real Magic, which I bought after his show. I’m not sure whether magic is real. I haven’t cast spells in ages, and haven’t felt any wonder that could pull me from doldrums. I suspect I was tricking myself into believing in the mystery, because fantasy makes reality tolerable.

  Staniforth writes, “Magic tricks are just a way to remember something you already know, or maybe knew and then forgot somewhere along the way. Take them for what they are and they’re nothing. You can’t look at them. You have to look through them, like a telescope.”

  6-21-16

  Carl and I look out the bridge tower window at passing boats. Something isn’t right. I have said the wrong thing, wanting to be closer. He was just saying he hates living in his house, a place full of intolerable memories, and I said, “Do you ever want to live with me?” I didn’t mean it—I meant it like sleep means a dream. What I meant was that I want us to live inside each other. We watch the boats and I watch my dream float down the canal, like a body making its passage into hell.

  6-21-18

  My back hurts and I can’t dream. I’m in a forest cabin near a river, where I am to do nothing but write. I sleep on a pallet. I can’t write because the past is dead and useless. How do I write a story after I’ve killed it? I’ve been asked a thousand times, What are you working on? And I have said, A book about how my heart was broken and how I became a powerful witch. Did I? Where’s my power now? I can hardly eat enough to stay upright.

  This is not the place in the woods where my back told me secrets two years ago, but it, too, has moss-coated cedars, Jurassic ferns, brambles, paths, water, a cabin with a loft. Two years ago, Venus was in the underworld and I believed I was in love. Now I don’t know where Venus is or if it matters. I’m susceptible to illusions and prone to spinning meaning from coincidence. I don’t remember the last time I felt anything more mystical than the cooling of the sweat on my shoulders in the Ohio afternoon, listening to doves cry like executioners.

  I am staring out the window at a hill covered in evergreens, unsure whether I will cry or not cry, having spent the whole morning wondering what the point of all this remembering might be. I know that two years ago, there was only one way out of my bed: magic. Maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s real, if I’m gullible and naïve, only that it lets me live.

  Twin Peaks, Log Lady intros

  LO
G LADY: There are clues everywhere, all around us. But the puzzle maker is clever. The clues, although surrounding us, are somehow mistaken for something else. And the something else, the wrong interpretation of the clues we call our world. Our world is a magical smoke screen.

  6-22-18

  Down the hill from my cabin, there’s a small building with a tiny library, a few shelving units of seemingly haphazardly collected books. There’s no cell service out here, and no Wi-Fi outside this room. I stand in the corner and play Twitter. When I look up, I see the shelves in front of me are packed with rows of books of the teachings of Gurdjieff, Carl’s favorite philosopher-mystic.

  You have forgotten something, the books whisper.

  Let me keep forgetting.

  Twin Peaks: The Return

  LOG LADY: Hawk, electricity is humming. You hear it in the mountains and rivers. You see it dance among the seas and stars and glowing around the moon. But in these days, the glow is dying. What will be in the darkness that remains? … Now the circle is almost complete. Watch and listen to the dream of time and space. It all comes out now, flowing like a river. That which is and is not.

  6-24-16

  The venue would give Carl a plus-one only for a spouse, so he said I was his wife. He meets me outside and tells me he’s given us an anniversary, just in case. While I watch him onstage, I don’t know whether he even sees me in the dark. Wife wife wife wife wife. I hold it like he holds the strings against the neck of his bass.

  Twin Peaks