White Magic

by Elissa Washuta

  The landscape is familiar and the US history is accurate enough, but the names and shapes of the five states are fake. That hardly matters. Borders are the flesh wounds of empire. On the map they look like stitches on a belly.

  I spend nights on my imaginary horse, galloping for so long it feels like this is the real world and the one I’m avoiding is the fake one. Racing up snowy hills past near-black evergreen boughs, or easing up a crag from a green valley, I see my past more clearly than I remember it. A snow-coated graveyard in a Washington coal mining town, the mountain-foot settlement where the Twin Peaks diner sells real pie, the shining lake I saw on my last drive across Snoqualmie Pass—forcing them to stay clear was too painful after I chose to leave the West. Rustling snow off boughs while my old hands keep a controller well-wrangled and a horse on a path, I see a world more real than a movie, and movies always seem more real than my life.

  I play for days. When I remember Twitter exists, I check on it, and it’s glad to see me, has something to tell me, lines by Carolyn Forché: “The heart is the toughest part of the body. / Tenderness is in the hands.” Mine become sore from the hours. The heart in my real body is resting. The heart in my satchel was carved from a wolf that nearly killed me. The game told me to collect perfect pelts from three jackrabbits, but I have no time. I cook the wolf. I become so thin I’m warned that this cannot continue.

  The game’s plodding pace forces endurance. I wash my limbs, ride my horse, chop wood. I walk the land, and my controller’s rumbling tells me there’s sage under my feet. I watch the other outlaws get wasted while I press R2 to raise my beer to my mouth. I am freed from the burden of narrative, allowed to waste my hours looking at birds, opening drawers, and greeting strangers who have nothing to say. This is what I came here for. And yet I don’t want it. There are so many paid ladies to bathe me, so many wild horses to break, but I am skipping the sidetracking delights because I want to know what’s going to happen.

  I pass days and nights following Dutch’s orders to rob and swindle the rich. We just need some money, he keeps saying. I’ll do whatever he wants. I am happier than I have ever been, lone body collapsed on this couch, mind collapsed into someone else’s make-believe land. This is the first time I’ve played a game and haven’t had to suspend disbelief. Instead, I have to suspend my belief in its world when I step away and remember my flesh body needs food and my flesh friends need care. I haven’t felt wonder lately, not for months, and I’m embarrassed by my enchanted obsession with this fake life.

  After many hours on the couch, I find the magic show. The game invites me to sit and watch. What better way to set the tone for a year in which I intend to finish the job of divorcing myself from reality? The magician is going to catch a bullet between his teeth. A Reddit user wrote, “That show was a genuine experience for me. I booed him throughout his show. When he asked for a volunteer I went straight up with a smug smile on my face. Then I shot him … And he cought the damn bullet. My jaw dropped.” I’m trying to remember how the bullet trick was explained in The Prestige. In Red Dead, the explanation from the magician Benjamin Lazarus is that death is only an illusion. I can do nothing with my controller but leave or react, cheer or boo, so I wait in this wonderland, not yet ready to accept the rational world and its mystery-erasing explanations.

  I get good at killing. It soothes me to take out the bad men. Anyway, death is an illusion. Die in a mission and restart a million times. The outlaws talk of two kinds of killers: the ones who do it desperate and the ones who like the blood. They’d make you think that evil and need have the same means and ends. Over and over and over, I careen down hills after bad men, foolish men, brave men, flawed men who are going to change by the end of all this. I shoot a man in the hand to save him. A man shoots my horse and I cry—I, Elissa, cry—but then I find a horse I like better because I saw her kick her man in the head and drop him. I tell an outlaw I’m not married because no one would have me. I rescue a lying magician—another one, not the one from the theater. I chase after yet another magician, who disappears in clouds of smoke before turning up holding a jackrabbit. I blow up a bridge. I meet a Tesla-type guy. I get pretty good at a game called five finger fillet, stabbing a knife into a table between spread fingers. I help out a circus master, keeper of farm animals costumed as zoo beasts, who tells me, “No one will pay for the truth. They will only pay for deception. The allure of the stage, dreams and reality … It’s the difference between prose and poetry, it’s alchemy. We’re selling dreams, dear boy!”

  In real life, I have given up spells. I am tired of trying to control this life. If people could make this game, an entire world of shops and garbage and roots and moonbeam mists, then I, person, must have more power of design than I know: maybe I did make the whole thing up, the thing about there being any cosmic plan. Slumped here, unmagicked by loss of hope, I wonder whether what feels mystical is just unadulterated reality, allowed to gleam with the alcohol haze removed. Maybe it’s not synchronicity so much as it is sobriety and its unrelenting readiness to attention. I never check out, and the more I notice, the more my brain makes patterns so this mean existence might make sense. And yet I feel something following me. The synchronicities build.

  I help a woman because if I don’t, she says she’ll be shipped off to live “somewhere awful, like … Ohio.” Her beloved calls her a “woman from the future,” says, “She’s like tomorrow, if tomorrow turns out fine.” It won’t, actually. Tomorrow Dutch bashes his head and sees triple. Tomorrow he kills a woman for nothing and I ask if he’ll strangle me too. Tomorrow men with machetes pour out of a cave where they keep a woman in a cage. Tomorrow I run through a coal mine like those where my real-life ancestors inhaled anthracite dust until their lungs were more black water than breath. Tomorrow we ride to die together, believing that’s what it takes to be free. Tomorrow Dutch leads me to my death over and over. He says we’re going to make a lot of smoke and then we’re going to disappear. “Real,” he says when his plans are questioned, when he’s told his perception might be off. “Oh, how I detest that word. So devoid of imagination.”

  What is real is that my wrists and left elbow are killing me. My hands might harden into claws around my controller. Outside the video game I agree to pay eighty-six dollars a month for parking at work; inside the video game I’m rewarded for being nice to a horse. Outside, I am in Ohio, which is not awful. It’s just real. Ohio is where I visited the Serpent Mound the game tries to replicate with the same name. That day, I was so listless with sweat and dread I could think of nothing to do but drive, which is not so different from Arthur’s riding. In the game and in life, there is a tower to climb to see the effigy coil from above. In life but not in the game, the curves align with celestial bodies. In the game but not in life, there is a treasure map in a hole in the middle, there to be taken, so I do.

  I don’t want to go to bed; I want to be an outlaw. I forgot all about the planets, didn’t even realize a solar eclipse came and went. The only moon I’ve seen in days shines on my blood-soaked shoulders while I ride. I am supposed to be relaxing so my life doesn’t kill me, but I’m playing with urgency because I have a feeling the ending will turn something like a key. But maybe I just can’t relax. I can’t shake the need to task myself with the work of controlling destiny; it’s like Dutch says, “There simply isn’t a reality in which we do nothing and get everything.”

  Everyone says to give it time. This is my training ground for patience. Time is what I feel when I’m on the horse, riding from town to town, looking for the end. The sun moves through the sky while I move across the land. I would like a portal. Eventually, I will get one, a map that will transport me to any place I’ve been before, but first I must put in my time on the paths, taking myself from point to point.

  I’ve been playing for days when I get to the reservation. I like the Indians. I like their Indian wisdom. I like how Rains Fall, the chief, says things like, “See the wolves over there feasting on that horse? Brutalit
y and beauty are both all around us, yet so often we’re unable to see past our own grievances.” I like that Arthur knows this situation is more complex than the white outlaws can understand and sees their intervention for what it is: interference. Most of all, I like riding to the fort where Rains Fall’s son Eagle Flies is being held by the US Army to be hanged for treason, and I like breaking him out of his cell, and I like escaping through river rapids that remind me of the Cascades of the Columbia from the Oregon Trail II game, which remind me of the Cascades of the Columbia that broke through what my real ancestors knew as the Bridge of the Gods. Swimming away from weapons of the government that has always wanted to kill us—us, me, my family, my ancestors—I feel I’m saving Tumulth, held at Fort Vancouver before his hanging. Is it a spoiler to say it doesn’t matter, a white man can’t save Eagle Flies, only give him brief reprieve before he has to die? Anyway, saving him doesn’t change the real-life timeline. My ancestor was still hanged.

  Along a different river, animals show up mangy. Bewitched villagers say demons come in darkness. The water pools orange—from the mine, it turns out. Nobody says sulfur creek, but I know. The demons are dogs. The possession is slow poisoning. The mine rots the land, and even in this fantasy, nothing can be done. The mission ends when I find the source and make a capitalist swindler drink the water. Nothing heals the villagers because knowing the problem doesn’t fix it. The mine never closes, the water never clears, and still I have inherited something I can’t understand.

  I don’t want to go outside with these feelings: I think about Dutch when he’s not around. By that I guess I mean I think about an imaginary man in a video game when I’m not playing it. This began when we robbed a train station and the frame lingered on Dutch, masked up with his red bandanna covering half his face, his gun drawn, all of which, unfortunately, I found incredibly hot. Maybe I only want a dangerous man. Maybe it’s just that these conjured men are the only people I’ve seen in days. Certainly, Dutch wants a mess and I love him. A nature photographer says, “This is America, after all. We hold a love for killers that borders on macabre. Loving killers is part of our makeup.”

  For the first time in memory, I do not have a man in my romantic sights. What does a real man have that an imaginary one doesn’t? There may be a good answer to consider, but right now, I have to rob this train. Dutch yells at me to have some goddamn faith. He has a plan and I need to trust him. He says, “We need to move towards a conclusion. Now.” I think he says something about how it all comes down to the fact that we outlaws love each other, but I don’t think to write it down, so maybe I just wanted to hear it.

  I have to leave the house and go to therapy, so I explain the entire plot of the game to my therapist, and yet we come no closer to understanding why I’m this way. I tell her about Dutch. How I became attracted to the fake man when he masked up for that robbery. It takes me considerable nerve to say so, but it seems like the key to understanding my whole life. She only says, “So you like the bad boys,” and when she puts it that way, it almost seems like what I want might not kill me. So I go back to my house-cave and talk to no real men until I can resolve these competing desires in me: to be loved by a dangerous man and to live.

  Every man in this game could lead a woman to her death if he hasn’t already. Some of the women look like me. Arthur’s ex writes him a letter and says, “I see clearly that your world is not one from which one can escape.” I begin to dream about Billy and his knife and his lies. My men never change, only I do when they leave me, but Arthur becomes a new man. A nun suggests, “Do a loving act,” and he does. I can’t figure out which character I am because I’m most of them, and so are my lost loves. I pause the game to cry because I don’t know a loving act when I see it, could feel nothing but scorn for the mercy of their disappearances.

  I ride my horse through lands that look just like Billy’s mother’s ranch, where I spent those days alone, patting the horses, studying the creep of a line of vultures down the sun-hot hill, watching the jackrabbit stand still in the field at dawn and wondering what it was going to mean. I like the game better. I like the meaning already made. I like how Arthur teaches a widow to skin a jackrabbit and says, “Just hold the legs tight and pull the skin away quickly. Should come right off,” and like magic, it does. I like to collect pretend carcasses instead of spending all my time having realizations. I would rather die and restart missions a thousand times than keep orchestrating the death of part of my soul so I can transform and reset myself.

  I’m racing through the narrative, trying to choke the meaning out of it. “It is mutually beneficial to draw attention to one problem and a veil over another,” Dutch says, and isn’t that a message? “We are dreamers in an ever duller world of facts,” he says, and isn’t that one too? A video game, what is it but a dream, and who is the dreamer? I am studying the fit of his brocade vest. The hinge of his hips. His anthracite eyes. My soot-souled king on a white horse grows cold. I am hurting—me, Elissa, I am hurting—when he shows he doesn’t love me like he said. One last job, he says. One last big score. One paradise we will reach at the end of all this. I keep noticing the way Dutch won’t look his woman in the eye, and I hear them in their tent at night, him asking what she wants from him, her saying she just wants some affection, just wants to be touched. Dutch van der Linde is no less real than any man I’ve ever loved. My long line of difficulties. My huckster beloveds.

  In the swamp, in an empty house fit for a séance, a painting of a strange top-hatted man completes itself. Messages on the walls are hardly readable in the candlelight: THE MOON WILL SHINE ON IN THE DARKNESS. THE WATER IS BLACK WITH VENOM. HIS FINAL TOLL WILL SOUND MY GREATEST COMING. I GAVE EVERYTHING FOR ART AND I LEARNED TOO MUCH AND NOTHING AT ALL. I hear that when every other game task is done, the strange man’s features will come into focus and he will appear behind me in the mirror. But now it’s just me, this dark little house, these paintings of animals, this man without a face.

  I begin sleeping through the night. I dream stories about men I used to think I understood. I read trauma rewires the brain. They say the same about video games. My brain is like an old Nintendo console, and I’m blowing on it hard and shoving it back in the slot. I want to make a mess of what’s in my head, pull it all apart and start over.

  Maybe I will spend the rest of my days in this world, starting and ending the game over and over. Maybe I will resolve America, which Dutch says is an apathy maker and Rains Fall says is a thing we cannot endure but must.

  Spoiler alert: at the end we are changed. We feel foolish or sad. Any narrative is a magic trick: the unfolding happens where you’re not looking. I wanted this narrative—this one, this story, this riddle, this experiment, this trick, this device—to teach me to love right, but all I know is that I’m not sure I can love a man who wouldn’t let me die. And maybe that means I can’t love a man if I want to live.

  I have to keep cycling through the game’s end and beginning over and over until I’ve beaten something. “We will disappear,” Dutch said. “Be reborn.” I have to lie under my weighted blanket, controller resting on my belly, until I learn to give up my strangulation hold on the narrative for just a little while. Living inside narratives means becoming an insight machine, and I am tired of realizing—that word is a lie. Conjuring up epiphanies doesn’t make anything real. Mostly, realizing is how I lie. I met a stranger on the side of the road who told me, “You keep hidden all that matters, sir, maybe even from yourself.” This is where I find myself stuck: at the edge of a dark lake whose bottom I can’t see or even imagine, trying to reason my way in from the shore.

  After the story ends and the credits roll, the game continues, and in a forest overtaken by torturers, a writer stands on a cliff and tells me the land is God and dreams. He says, “Wonderment is our morphine, I suppose.” His books used to sit in Dutch’s tent: An American Eden, The American Inferno. Now he’s writing one he thinks will be different. He’s calling it America. He shuts himself in his
cabin, refusing to leave, eat, or drink liquor until the manuscript is complete. He dies at his desk, his face in a notebook where he’s written, “When I’m done, just burn me,” so I set the little house aflame.

  I am nearing my cue for the epilogue I will not write because nobody likes that part of the game. I will exit while I still have something at stake, something still to be gained or lost, because resolution has gone out of fashion. I’m more interested in looking back to my curious and hopeful beginning, before I knew I would cry. I will start over. Do it better this time. Identify every animal. Craft every garment from their pelts. I’m going to listen to what Dutch said about love, and I’ll find out whether he meant it at all, or whether he just wanted something and got confused, or whether any of his act was real. Maybe it doesn’t matter, because the empire doesn’t want us to love. It was built to break our reaching hands. Dutch once said, “This is America, you can always make a deal,” and sometimes I think I made mine with the devil, agreeing to this pretty incarnation in exchange for life as a wanted woman. That’s not what Dutch meant. He thinks he has a plan to outrun empire, but we who dreamed of escape were born with bounties on our heads. Is a plan the same as intuition? It might be the opposite. I collapsed into the universe’s plan and followed the map of its signs, but I feel a change coming: soon, I’m going to ask myself what I want. Magic, but then what? The super blood wolf eclipse of the moon is coming soon. I hear that out in the woods, on a peak in the snow, among the evergreens, there’s a fast white horse you can coax into your arms. After I restart, I will look for it in the unmapped thin place where the universe and I meet, not at a single point, but consuming each other in a dimension beyond plotting. Dutch says, Ride with me. We die. We ride. I restart again and again because the worst part of the story is the end.