White Magic

by Elissa Washuta

  8-31-18

  I wake up in a California hotel room, adding the digits of today’s date in my head. Eight plus three is eleven, lucky, then it’s followed by an eleven, lucky, and eights on both ends, infinity. This has to be auspicious. The numbers keep adding themselves, the brain keeps chattering, until a thought breaks through: Carl knew he was hurting you and he did it anyway.

  In Twin Peaks: The Return, Cooper is shown to still be held in the Black Lodge, twenty-five years after entering. The lodge spirit MIKE asks him once again, in backward-speak, “Is it future or is it past?” Another lodge spirit, the evolution of the Arm, asks Cooper in a halting rasp,

  Do

  You

  Remember

  Your

  Doppelgänger

  Yes, Cooper remembers.

  He

  Must

  Come

  Back

  In

  Before

  You

  Can

  Go

  Out

  I write about Carl all morning, then, just to get away and see the ocean before my evening reading, I drive to Malibu with eyes flicking back and forth from road to clock so I can collect more special numbers to go with 11:11, the time on the clock when I turned the key in the ignition. I want to get out of my head, maybe by letting the ocean have my body. I recall the scene in which Cooper’s doppelgänger, looking mean in a snakeskin-print shirt, drives fast through a canyon like this one (filmed near here, actually). He says, “I’m supposed to get pulled back in to what they call the Black Lodge. But I’m not going back there. I’ve got a plan for that one.”

  I don’t understand the plan. I don’t have one of my own. When I get to the ocean and walk in, I ask for a spirit to rise up into my legs and clean me, heal me, protect me, but all the spirits are dead, including the one that used to live in my body. I keep trying to remember Cooper’s doppelgänger’s plan, as though the show were a manual, not a story.

  The Prestige

  CUTTER, THE INGÉNIEUR, IN VOICE-OVER: Every magic trick consists of three parts, or acts. The first part is called “the pledge.” The magician shows you something ordinary. A deck of cards, a bird—or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it, to see that it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course, it probably isn’t.

  The second act is called “the turn.” The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now, you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it, because, of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be … fooled.

  But you wouldn’t clap yet, because making something disappear isn’t enough. You have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act. The hardest part. The part we call … “the prestige.”

  9-1-18

  I fly from LA to another city to meet this guy Billy from Twitter. I know his history: fights, concussions, addiction, intractable depression, cheating, and loss. I choose to instead watch the signs I can call synchronicities: auspicious birthday matches, a coincidence tattooed on his body, his dog and my cat sharing a name. One day, while I was checking Twitter to see if his birthday was listed so I could look into his natal chart, he texted me to ask, What’s your birthday?

  All summer I’ve been seeing 1111 and retching at the sight of food. When I’m alone and have nobody to talk to, I talk to Billy. I’ve been imagining his world from photos he texts me and I’ve been sending him mine in return. I’ve been collecting photos of his face, so much like Henry’s. One night I dreamed Henry had the evil sucked out of him. Now here I am, following signs.

  When I drive my rental car into the town nearest his where I could find a cheap motel room, I feel a jolt under my tires, which I don’t immediately realize is an earthquake, the first I’ve ever felt. I see the number 444 everywhere, which seems like a sign; I decide it means love and luck even though the internet says it also means death and destruction. I have lived long enough to know I really might die this time, meeting this stranger in an unfamiliar town, staying in a Travelodge whose street address is 444, which could mean anything.

  This town is so dry, full of desert plants—it is, after all, a dry place—and it feels like the set of a movie. I’m not thinking about it, but Billy has told me, so part of me knows: a famous killer murdered people in this town. I wait in the motel bed for my dénouement. I could be the horror movie’s final girl, the one who survives to the end.

  9-3-17

  In the seconds after the ending of the final episode of Twin Peaks: The Return, my lungs hold breath as though pausing my vital processes can eke another minute out of the show. The ending is upsetting, a refusal to close, but I think it has a message for me. As I exhale, the curtain rod in my bedroom falls off the wall and crashes to the floor.

  9-3-18

  I keep waking in a motel room. Billy is sleeping. After he arrived, we talked and watched Shark Tank. Now I watch him. My twin, as we keep saying. His pants are on the floor. His knife and keys are on the table. The parking lot lamp yellows his face. I say a silent prayer, not for my spirit guardians to show me their will, but to keep me safe and to let my heart be happy.

  9-4-16

  While Emily and I walk to the park, I tell her about how the other night, during one of my long walks, I had a strong feeling that I was going to run into Carl’s friend Eric, and then I did. Between eclipses, with Mercury retrograde, the veil is thin, the portal is open, and people return from the past. We’re talking about this when Carl, grinning in his Volvo, drives through the intersection ahead of us. I’d say it was a mirage my mind made from pain, but Emily sees him too.

  9-4-18

  Back in therapy for the first time in more than a year, I tell my story all over again. When the therapist asks me whether I see, hear, or feel things that aren’t really there, I don’t want to answer. She presses, so I tell her, “Sometimes, when I’m going to sleep, I feel somebody’s fingers in my hair.” She writes it down. I am trying to tell her everything, starting with being raped in the middle of the night, but we run out of time. “You’ve experienced an incredible amount of trauma,” she says. She doesn’t know whether she can help me.

  What if the problem is not the residual trauma from past men, but the fresh harm from those I keep in my life after they hurt me? I block Carl’s number and his Instagram, an experiment.

  9-9-17

  A love spell candle burns to its end while I google Carl because I miss him and he didn’t text me back. At the moment the flame turns to a column of smoke, I find a page about Karl Germain, a dead magician from Ohio. The same name, first and last, differing slightly in spelling but not in sound. In the black-and-white photos, the same slightness, the same loose curls of dark hair, the same hands trained to conjure things into existence and make them disappear.

  9-11-18; Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

  I am tired of writing this and I want to exit. My thoughts are tangled. Ohio is a real place, while this book is the dreamer, written in dreams. Jung wrote, “The imaginatio, or the act of imagining, is thus a physical activity that can be fitted into the cycle of material changes, that brings these about and is brought about by them in its turn. In this way the alchemist related himself not only to the unconscious but directly to the very substance which he hoped to transform through the power of imagination.”

  The point of all these words was to change me—that is always my point with words, to get out from under something. It’s not working.

  9-13-16

  I just want Carl to return my necklace. I bought the crystals two years ago when I was sad: one for protection, one for psychic ability, one for creativity. Since he won’t respond to my texts about mailing it to me, I finally say he can do whatever he wants with it, can throw it in the trash even, and I’ll mail his tapes back.

  After I ship them, I walk aimlessly. On the redbrick sidewalk in front of the community college, a man stops me and holds out his a
rm. Dozens of necklaces are hanging from it, each with a crystal. He tells me I could buy some, so I choose an amethyst for healing and a rose quartz for my heart. We don’t talk while he makes change until he says, “My name is Carl.”

  “Oh,” I say. “My name is Elissa.”

  He looks at me as though he’s thinking, Why would you tell me that? then says, “Don’t forget you met me.”

  On the way home, I stop at the magic store and buy a black candle for a spell to banish Carl from inside me. It burns down into two lumps, shaped like my great-grandmother and her mother in the photo taped to the wall above my altar, a ratty printout of the photo in my parents’ hallway. What do my grandmothers know about me? What do they want me to know about them?

  9-14-18

  Billy texts, saw this on instagram and thought of you, along with a screenshot:

  Ask me a question about Tarot!

  How do I know who my twin flame is?

  That’s not a Tarot Question! But I am sure a tarot reading may help you in determining if your partner is meant for you. When you meet your twin flame you will know because it is as if the stars have aligned, magic is in the air, and the chemistry on a molecular level between the two of you will be undeniable. It isn’t lust, it isn’t obsession, it isn’t infatuation with one another. It’s a deeper knowing. The soul is returning home.

  I’m surprised to hear he thinks of me when he’s on Instagram. I secretly watch his likes and follows. Hundreds and hundreds of tattooed, thick-hipped white women in thongs. I could never tell him. I’m supposed to be cool with this, not jealous like a child. My hair is falling out. I sleep only for an hour here and there. He’s not telling me something, so I fear him. But the universe seems to be saying this is where I need to be, so I stay.

  9-21-16

  I’m in an office park across the lake to see a psychic named Todd. He knows all kinds of things: some he could look up, sure, but also some he couldn’t, like that my grandpa could speak a bit of a blend of Eastern European languages common in the coal region. That’s not exactly what Todd says—he says he’s hearing a jumble of languages. He says I will find love in the springtime. He tells me to protect myself, because psychic attacks are coming. He wants me to be precise with my spells, because I am powerful and I am going to bring myself something I don’t want.

  9-21-18

  I’ve been at Billy’s house for three miserable days, mostly lying fully dressed in his bed. I’m his girlfriend now. He told me he saw someone make a heart eyes emoji and wanted to fight him, then asked if we could be exclusive. Everything was fine over texting; now I’m in his house and things are not fine. He had told me two dogs lived with him, but when I arrived and asked where they were, he said they actually live with his mother. What do I really know about him? The Travelodge room, nobody’s house, was another dimension, detached from reality.

  We got naked, like we’d planned. Right away, he lost interest, dressed, and left the room. I’ve begun seeing images of scorpions everywhere: encased in resin on his mantel, in pendants in my Instagram feed. The internet says they live underground. The Egyptian scorpion deity Serket guards the dead, practices magic, and guards thresholds. Scorpion venom is wounding to prey, healing to the scorpion.

  We fuck just once. It feels like nothing.

  I feel more when I lie on the edge of the bed and press my body against the wall, desperate to reach for his neck, but he doesn’t want us to touch. Paracelsus said, “The scorpion cures the scorpion.” I would rather be a spider and climb out of here on silk spun from my body.

  9-23-18

  Transiting Jupiter conjuncts my natal Saturn for the third and final time this year. Billy drives me to the airport. He seems vexed at everything I say, so I look out the window and try to think of something better to talk about, but I can’t say anything that doesn’t make him mean. From the plane, I text to ask him whether he likes me anymore, and he says maybe he’s not the one for me, if I’m going to keep needing all this reassurance. Is that what I need? I need to be touched, I know that much; I’m skin-starving after a week spent lying under the covers, watching him heart photo after photo of filtered phantasms I’ll never resemble.

  “Are you breaking up with me?” I ask, and because I can’t see his face, I don’t know what he’s not telling me when he says, “No.”

  9-24-18; Hanif Abdurraqib, “It’s Not Like Nikola Tesla Knew All of Those People Were Going to Die”

  Hanif told me he was writing about The Prestige, and one of his poems is available online from PoetryNow today:

  Few things are more dangerous than a man

  who is capable of dividing himself into several men,

  each of them with a unique river of desire

  on their tongues.

  Billy doesn’t love me today, and didn’t yesterday or the day before or, really, since the moment I stepped into his house and became real. He loves the future that never comes. We don’t text or speak all day.

  Wikipedia

  “Scorpion stings lead to paralysis and Serket’s name describes this, as it means ‘(she who) tightens the throat,’ however, Serket’s name also can be read as meaning ‘(she who) causes the throat to breathe’, and so, as well as being seen as stinging the unrighteous, Serket was seen as one who could cure scorpion stings and the effects of other venoms such as snakebite.”

  9-25-18

  I haven’t heard from Billy and I’m afraid to text him. I have a body-shaking, breath-constricting panic attack while I drive to get my allergy shot. I realize I haven’t taken the allergy pill that’s supposed to prevent me from going into anaphylaxis again. No matter, I think. I’ll let the universe decide whether I should be put out of my misery. If my throat closes, I will walk to my car and I will die.

  The universe decides I have to stay, and so I stay.

  10-3-17

  Emily texts me that our friend who referred us to Todd the psychic now believes him to be a fake. She has no details and I don’t need any. I was wrong about the world; there is nothing magic in it.

  My mom texts me, too. Last week, our Fitbits recorded the same number of steps: 55,091.

  10-5-18

  Venus goes retrograde at 11 degrees Scorpio. Relationships will be reviewed, bonds tested; anything fragile will break. The Sabian Symbol for this degree is “A drowning man is being rescued.”

  10-12-17

  Carl is coming through Ohio on tour. In June, he told me to come; in September, I texted him to ask whether he still wanted that, and a week later, he said, sure. So I’m in Cleveland, walking. His show is tomorrow. I want this visit to be our end.

  I walk past a building painted with garish blocks of color, black and white stripes, and moon phases. It seems to be an art space, not yet open to the public. On the glass door, there’s a Shel Silverstein poem:

  If you are a dreamer come in

  If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar

  A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer

  If you’re a pretender come sit by my fire

  For we have some flax golden tales to spin

  Come in! Come in!

  The door is locked.

  10-12-18

  It’s been one week since I texted Billy a nude he never responded to. Tonight, on the phone call he agrees to every few days, he is depressed—I can’t blame him, I can’t get upset, I can’t make a big deal—and he talks about moving to Ohio. While we talk, I watch via the Instagram Following tab as he likes a year’s worth of a stranger’s selfies. The internet says men cope like this. I shouldn’t interfere. When we hang up, I open Twitter, where he’s been having a conversation with some woman for the last half hour. The internet asks whether I love him or want to possess him. Let him look, the articles say. I fear something beyond loss. If I tell him I don’t like this, what will he do?

  10-13-17

  Cleveland Public Library’s special collections department includes a book about the magician Karl Germain. I spend hours with it, enchanted
by the photos: the magician as a teenager, holding a rabbit by its ears; the magician now a man, holding a card over a blindfolded lady’s head; the magician watching a dim gray skeleton reach for the hand of a clock; the magician reaching for a translucent ghost lady in a white gown and veil. Describing trick after trick, biographer Stuart Cramer writes of a handkerchief color-change, “Here is real magic.”

  The magician’s Great Vanishing Horse Illusion, a show finale, involved a white horse, a plain black stage, and black velvet curtains. A large cloth was thrown over the horse, and then the magician, with the aid of another, would remove it to show that the horse had vanished.

  The spirit séance was a staple of the magician’s show, and his most important tool was the spirit cabinet. The magician places a chair, bell, tambourine, and musical instrument in this big, man-height cabinet. The items become animated, knocking around inside the cabinet before escaping it. The magician goes into a trance. A vapor of a human figure emerges from the cabinet to touch the magician, then beckons for him to follow her inside. He does. He comes out. “Slowly I recover, snapping my fingers and opening my eyes, gaze at the audience, and then into the cabinet,” he wrote. The illusion ends. The audience is left, according to the magician, depressed.

  The magician said, “Conjuring is the only absolutely honest profession—a conjuror promises to deceive and does.”

  The band arrives later. Carl comes to the house I’m staying in, but he’d rather sit on the cold patio furniture in the yard stinking of rotting fruit than come inside. I tell him coming inside doesn’t have to mean anything; we’ll sit in the living room. He agrees, and when we sit on separate ends of the hard couch, I think about what a mistake I’ve made. It’s still a mistake when we’re sitting close together in the sunken middle of the green-room love seat and he tells me, “I’ve sort of been seeing someone.” I tell him I know, I felt it, he can’t hide anything from me. He says she takes so long to text him back that he wonders how she feels about him.