She sat on a park
bench and extracted a plain cheese sandwich from a red purse and unwrapped it tenderly
as if it were a beating heart. On a lilied black lagoon two rowers paddled unsyncopated,
arching toward the shore, and she took fastidious bites. Her mind elsewhere,
she masticated sweet fleshy bits and drew taste but no pleasure from the act.
She pulled the hem of her dress over pretty knees attached to accommodating
calves and strong thighs that curved into hips that squeezed into narrow waist.
She stood 5 feet 10 inches, a height from which she took a robin’s eye view of
shorter women who stiffened at her seeming bluenose airs, her Buenos Aires’.
Oval
face and soft baby fat (at 27) covered high cheekbones. Swollen capillaries
kept them the color cherry— no cherries below deck. Her shoulders and arms were
angular, like a teenaged boy’s, not lacking grace and form, but cavalierly hung,
as if they were equipped to whip underhand softballs at angry female batters.
She
was shy, modest, apologetic about her good looks, but certainly couldn't conceive
of herself otherwise. And like those of similar bent and mode she subliminally
devised means to exploit the loveliness without over-compromise. Because her
intelligence was more intuitive and theoretical than pragmatic she graduated
with an English degree from an extension campus. Her ambitions were the extravagant albeit
undefined ones of twenty-somethings. It had been six years now since graduation
and still she waited for fate to manifest while she worked as a proofreader at
a small publishing house. Not much for English majors out there, she ruefully thought.
She unfolded the newspaper and, as she
did every day, immediately skipping to the help wanted to see if providence had
called. Etchings of doubt, however, harbingers of age had crept in, a sense
that her uniqueness was ignored by those higher powers which cozen and consign
destiny's favors. A harder edge had crusted gentle sensitivities. It wasn’t
jadedness or world-weariness, not yet, but it had an air of ennui. Not that she
would ever seriously consider it, but she held to it as a last resort: marry
one of the dull men who commonly importuned not her, but her beauty, and pursue
a vague dream under the auspices of marriage. Why, Sylvia Why?
Suddenly,
as if a sign from her gods, it leapt off the page!
Call 314 875-6655
Her legs were
shapely! A magic marker materialized and she circled the ad. She checked the time: 12:20, and dug for her
cell phone. Oh no!—left at home. The phone at the pagoda en route to her
cubicle was closest. She tossed her brown bag in a trashcan, first removing the
apple, which she carried in her hand. Her heart pounded in her chest like a
kettledrum—an excitement she hadn’t felt since that night she’d thought she was
being stalked. This job would be hers. Her legs were long and she knew she
could divert the attention of the marks—that was the right word wasn’t it? —who
would gasp in awe at the magician’s wizardry, while tracking the sinuous line
of thigh up to hip, her hand languidly arched. She imagined the magician. He
wouldn't be a glib smiling conjurer with long wavy hair, or too black,
connected eyebrows. Her need was for someone darker, older, less suitable for
TV than he was for Las Vegas—not a black magician, but an illusionist who knew
his way around a spell and was not too pure to take a bite of evil and treat it
like a shallow friend, wear it like a rented tuxedo. What was the good of magic
without that? Evil held mighty sway. She required practical magic.
The stars had aligned
and a door she had waited for since, well, at least a year, blew open. Of all
days to forget her cell phone! She hoped the pagoda phone worked. An apple bit
clung to her lip. After the fifth ring no answering device or service picked
up. She let it ring and another minute passed. Impatient, she bit her thumb
nail and her right foot tapped on the sticky, soda-sweetened concrete.
Deflated, she hung up. What sort of magician advertised and then made no
accommodation for applicants?
A pagoda eave shadowed
her dejection and she stared over the lagoon. Wind rippled the surface and the
lines receded like her dream. The phone rang and startled her. It rang again.
This would be too much, she thought. Nonetheless, intrigued, she eased it off
its cradle and held it to her ear and said, “Hello.”
“Were you calling
about the magician’s assistant?”
The voice was gentle
and disarming, almost sad and she could not discern its age or intent. “Yes. Yes I was.”
“Would you like to
schedule an interview?”
She hesitated almost
too long. There was something final about what this question implied, something
contained in the quiet voice that spoke of power and mystery and deliverance
from the mundane, but which also spoke of sacrifice and the isolation of hard
knowledge. She nearly hung up. If the voice had mouthed another word, if it had
seemed the least bit coercive, impetuous, or manipulative, fatuous or snide, if
it had not been utterly impassive and neutral, she would have.
“Yes,” she said.
“When would be
convenient for you?”
She decided he was
older, forty to fifty. Generally it is the older man who can speak
cultivatedly, evenly with a woman. Younger men are diffident or blustery,
arrogant, or mocking, cloaking their unease in falsity. “I could make it this evening after six.”
“That would be fine.
Let’s say seven-thirty. The Cleveland Arms.
Twenty-one hundred Lincoln Avenue, between Barker and Holmes. I’ll tell
the doorman I’m expecting you.”
“Yes. Yes that would
be fine.” She listened to the affect she put on. It wasn’t exactly herself but
it wasn’t exactly not. “Goodbye,” she said but he had already hung up and she
glanced around self-consciously, and added “Seven-thirty will be fine. It will
give me time to go home and eat and change and watch the news before I catch a
bus.” No, she thought. I will take a
cab.
Though she expected
it, the afternoon did not pass like writer’s block. Content filled her hours
that, being an avid self-analyst, she attributed to that evening’s interview.
Obviously, a clairvoyant bond had been made. But too, she was cautious:
chemicals could precipitate well being, the mind tricking her, setting her up
for disappointment, which, she recognized, a perverse part of herself had
acquired a taste for.
Fifteen minutes
before five, her boss, Rita, bent her nose in the cubicle. Rita imagined what a
letter of recommendation would read like for Sarah Maloney, Bachelor’s of
English. “To whom it might concern,” she would begin. “Sarah is competent and
dreamy, imaginative and punctual.” She thought a moment and added: “I would
hate to lose her.”
“How goes the Afternoon
of the Clown?” Rita asked.
Sarah looked up with
astonished innocence and the libidinous indifference of pretty young women who
try not to make an issue of it.
“Rita.”
“How are you doing?”
“It’s actually “Aftermath of Upheaval.”
The boss stared down the
young woman’s cleavage and not for the first time wondered about the disavowed
lesbianism, and pictured her curve in black leather, mask and dominatrix spikes.
Wayward virtue had the tendency to experiment, to twist in peculiar style
before cooling into domestic missionary tedium. Sarah was skilled and
attractive enough for Rita to recommend they keep her on. How long? She didn’t
know. She supposed Sarah would decide that.
“It’s going fine. I
should have it done tomorrow.”
Sarah’s eyes blinked
rapidly, the elongated lashes flapped like Morse code. Something was amiss
here, Rita deduced, something asynchronous.
She was a manager because she was psychologically adept and had insight
into motivation and need and weakness and strength; she knew who would perform
to capacity and no more. She could ID malcontent. She knew who responded to
prolixity or brevity, who had to be coddled or cudgeled or corralled. Sarah,
she saw, was on edge.
“Is something wrong, dear?”
she coddled.
Oh shit, Sarah thought.
She knows. She can read me.
“No.”
“There’s not something
you’d like to talk about.”
Those who spoke to
Rita on the phone did not know she was Black. She had eradicated all the
shibboleths African Americans are prone to, and this made her seem exceedingly
intelligent in the eyes of her white supervisors who presented her more as a
showcase than a token.
Oh right, Sarah
thought. I’m going to tell her I have a job interview tonight. “Everything’s
fine.”
“Okay. Why don’t you
leave a little early tonight? You can get a jump on the crowd.”
“Thinks Rita. That’d
be great.” A quick light danced in her eyes and she had a hand in the desk
drawer before the words were out—both of which Rita noted. A date maybe, the
Black woman thought.
*
Sarah opted for the
subway and not the bus. It was quicker, less safe, but she was in a hurry.
Briefly she considered staying downtown to shop but she couldn’t afford a new
outfit and she should be able to put something together. She wondered if she
should wear a short skirt, one to exhibit her long shapely legs. Or would that
be the second interview? The magician had sounded sensible and might want a
practical assistant, not one to try and beguile him with flesh. But then the ad
had been specific about shapely legs. It was a dilemma. Distracted, she
nearly missed her stop and stumbled when the train lurched and thrust her
against a young black male with the bill of his cap turned backward at an
off-center angle.
“Whoa mama,” a boy
who was no more than 17 said.
“Excuse me,” Sara
apologized, remembering the turned bill represented some gang. This was why she
ordinarily took the bus. She shot through the doors and failed to see that the
youth and one of his homies got off as well and trailed behind her.
She ran up the stairs
and was not winded when she reached the top because she worked out at a health
club on the treadmill three times a week. That and nautilus machines kept her
fit and diminished sexual frustration to a tolerable degree, though she did
have a utility lover she could call when the treadmill and her masturbatory
manipulations weren’t enough and she required flesh. Davis did not want
commitment and he didn’t love her but he loved her body and the way her lower
lip perspired when she was on the edge of a climax, when her eyes fluttered and
she groaned and he was certain she wasn’t faking it because she wasn’t that
good of an actress.
She met Davis when he
delivered her Chinese takeout. She buzzed him up, noting the lack of Asian
accent. She opened the door on his virile impudence. Typical, two days of
beard, black eyebrows, large lips, blue eyes that told her he knew what she
wanted. When his hand lingered over hers on paying, she brushed her fingertips
across the bottom of his palm and in ten minutes he was eating her as if she
were a grapefruit (he hated pizza). I am such a tramp she told herself
afterwards, lingering over the pie, her twat still tingling.
Sarah walked quickly
the sidewalk toward her street, mind in her closet considering outfits,
discarding one after the other. She should have asked the magician’s name. He
might be well known and she might have heard of him and that would have
assisted her in dressing. She’d know his approximate age.
“Sarah?”
She blinked out of
her trance and stopped as a body approached and stopped beside her. She zeroed
in on the face of a man, long tousled rusty brown hair, stray eyes, a plaintive
smile. “I’m sorry. I don’t know you,” she responded after a moment’s hesitation
and moved on more quickly than before, paying more attention now. She arrived
at her apartment building unaware that half a block away the two “gangstas”
watched her enter. The man with the smile watched the two watch Sarah. A
one-eyed dog ignored them.
Her apartment was
small. She was not hungry but understood she should eat and she plunked a can
of tuna on the countertop. She opened it and drained off the water and set it
down and halted her movements and fell into thoughtless reverie. She spooned
mayonnaise and the fish into a bowl. Tweeeeet. Had a dolphin spoken to
her? She was uncharacteristically calm;
the unsettledness that defined much of her mind and actions quieted. She added
lemon and salt and made a sandwich and sat to eat. On a kitchen wall a cuckoo
clock hung. One wood antler leaned askew. Since she was in her own home she
could lick her fingers, but she did so delicately. A digit lingered sensuously
on her lips. She wondered if the magician would expect her to suck him
off. And she wondered if she would do it
or want to work for a magic man who required fellatio. She remembered the first
penis she had ever sucked. It was her high school boyfriend’s best friend and
it happened after a football game their senior year. Larry was a laughing rake,
charming and boyish and the reverse of her debating team captain boyfriend
whose religiosity precluded pre-marital treat. From the back seat of his
father’s Oldsmobile the boy extirpated his penis with an impish innocence and
invited her inspection. Hmmm, what have we here?
Sarah looked at the
clock on the stove: nearly six. The cuckoo didn’t work, the bird did not wake.
The mystical sway of the magician’s voice ebbed and second thoughts surfaced.
What sort of job security could there be, really? What was wrong with her
anyway? Was there health insurance, a dental plan? She wasn’t terribly
intellectual but she read bestsellers and kept up with Pulitzer winners and
could name at least three European movie directors and several contemporary
artists, what wine to drink with fish: white, maybe a Zinfandel. Baring her
distracting flesh and parading around the stage would atrophy her mind. At
least the proofreading, screamingly boring as it was, exposed her to ideas and
provided a medical package. She was on the verge of chucking it when her cell
phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Yes. This is
Maximilian Miles. I was wondering if you would be able to make the appointment
at seven instead of seven-thirty?”
She had no time to
indulge her surprise (How, for instance, did he acquire her number?) but fell
again under the spell of the melodious voice. She thought quickly. She had
planned on taking a bus to the appointment and then grabbing a taxi home. Seven
would mean a taxi there. Recouping composure and assertiveness she asked, “I
was wondering…” She paused. What was she wondering? Dental plan? How to back
out of the interview?
After a four second
hesitation, Max Miles interjected. “I can answer all your questions at the
interview. I’ll see you in a little over an hour. Bye bye.”
There was no hocus
pocus to his voice. Would a magician say “bye bye?” She found herself in the
bedroom taking dresses and suits off the rack. She extended a black pants suit
out from her in her left hand, and in her right held a dress she had purchased
to go to a dance club with a friend at work, Mary Beth Fahey, an Irish girl who
had burgundy hair and a pierced nipple. Sarah had seen it at the club after she
and Mary had had several drinks and the conversation got steered to
self-stimulation. Self-mutilation, the prude in Sarah silently aired…while her
kinky-bent ached to tweak the ring.
“Look at this,” the
Irish girl said and flipped her halter down.
Sarah decided on the
pants suit. Maximilian would have to take her word about her shapely legs;
either that or she could take the pants off after she gave him a blow job.
Listen to me! On the cusp of character change she had gotten sardonic and
bitter: the cynic was of more practical value than her Pollyanna. Sensitivities
weren’t dulled but relegated to a backburner.
She showered quickly,
changed her underwear and opened the closet to reveal a full-length mirror. She
checked out her long legs, followed the contour of the hip over the pelvis
which should be plenty wide to Pez out babies when she was ready for that. Her
mind went to the magician. What were his sexual leanings? She had trouble
imagining magicians with wives. It did not fit the image. But then, she
couldn’t picture them gay. There was a decided asexuality to magic. Through
must needs energies were directed to the paranormal. But then again, her mind shot
forward as she slipped the black suit pants on, magicians’ skills were those of
misdirection and legerdemain not any bona fide supernatural marvel. That was
the illusion.
She called a cab and
waited in the foyer. A fear struck her. A black gangsta stood across the
street. It might have been the same one from the train and her mind recreated
the smell of him, the metallic acidity. She empathized with the underprivileged
and fought her prejudice but could not quell her distaste and fright over the
baggy-pantsed emblem. She leaned back into the shadows and when the cab honked
she lowered her head and ran to it and got in quickly.
The cabby was brown
and had trouble enunciating the “w” in “Where to?” It sounded like “Hare two?” She gave him Max
Mile’s address and turned her head away from the side of the street where the
boy was. But he saw her. His intentions were vague, his purpose unformulated,
his actions precipitated by emotion and atavistic impulse, tempered less by
morality and law than the fear of punishment. He watched her drive away and his
loins ached for this white prize that had thrust her flesh against his in the
subway. Now he knew where she lived but tempting as this knowledge was he
shoved illegality out of mind. He was two months from turning 18. All the rules
would change.
“Les go, Brassworks,”
he said to his homeboy and they each turned their palms backward and walked the
sidewalk arrogantly abreast, looking as if their hackles were raised and a
fight was imminent. The man who said hello to Sarah watched them head back to
the subway.
Six blocks further on
the cabbie rear-ended an SUV and an angry driver exploded out of door. Sarah
didn’t wait for the confrontation and got out and hurried away.
“Hey,” the cabbie
called after her but the SUV driver diverted his attention:
“You dumb foreign
fuck. Look what the fuck you’ve done.”
Frantically Sarah
sought out another cab but none slowed at her call, shadows filled back seats.
She looked around but didn’t know the neighborhood. An Eastern European ethnicity
occupied it. Unreadable signs in alien script above storefronts advertised
cultural products. She waved at another cab. She passed by a scrunched old
woman in a black shawl and thought “this does not bode well.” A cab pulled over
and she got in.
“Hare two?” the
cabbie asked and turned around.
“You!” they exclaimed
in unison.
“Doan tell me, I
know,” he said.
He proceeded to
explain to her that the altercation was quickly resolved but she guessed from
his frequent worried glances in the rear view mirror that he had fled the
accident scene. When he pulled to the curb in front of the Cleveland Arms (a great
green awning stretched like a tunnel to curbside), he swiveled his head and
said, “You doan pay. Is free for pretty lady.”
She tacitly
understood the accident never occurred and hoped he hadn’t killed the SUV
driver. “Oh thank you. You are so kind.”
“I never see you. You
never see me,” he muttered and sped off.
Nothing is free.
A doorman in a
uniform, the same green as the portal, held out an open umbrella above his head
and extended it toward her though it was not raining, nor overcast.
“You must be Sarah,”
he stated in a low voice.
“Yes,” she answered, the
Poppins lady came to mind, no sun, no rain. When had she given magic man her
name? Was this more mind reading?
“Go right in. The
elevator is to the right. Mr. Miles is in apartment 702.” He laughed at this.
“Nothing magic about that number, is there?”
Her thoughts whirled,
her brain absorbed alien milieu, and she thanked him docilely and resented his
impact upon her and hurried to an elegant lamp-lit vestibule. She pulled on an
enormous brass handle attached to thick glass doors and glanced back in the
magic glass at the doorman. Shouldn’t he have gotten that? His lips turned up
slightly in a polite sneer.
In the reflection she
understood hate, but neglected to see how the magician had begun to manipulate.
His being drew her into his orbit onto divergent tack. The subconscious
presence seized her preconceptions and perception. The doorman’s hate was not
for her or Miles. It was hate. Hate of love. Hate of hate. Hate for all. Hate
hate hate hate ad nauseam.
His mind was not
stronger, more had encompassed it— his door flung wide to the universe, and so
the cosmos accepted the invite of one of its myriad prodigal fruit—entering in
manageable increments—and pronounced him, against his wishes, conduit and
catalyst. It was the same with prophets and madmen.
But he was no
prophet. And he was not mad. He had caught the cusp of a wave at a young age
and had been astride it since—a step ahead of others, a half step ahead of
himself, stumbling, mumbling to disguise his errant soul. And this is how his
magic and career had come about. Because he lived neither in the past nor
future, because he was present as spectacles were manifest and it was mistaken
as magic. An example: If he were to stand by a tree it would happen a twig
would fall into his hand at the precise moment his fingers closed. Would this
be magic through default?
The elevator opened
on the sixth floor and she exited and walked up the last flight to calm her
nerves. Neither did she want to be too predictable. This was a strategy her
father, a relocated federal protection witness, honed into her.
“Even the grocery
store, honey.” He admonished. “Even the laundromat.”
Her feet echoed in
the antiseptic steel and concrete stairwell. At the landing a big black 7 hung
above the door which opened into a wide hallway with a plush blue carpeted
floor. Seven-zero-two was at the opposite end. She tenuously raised her hand to
knock and let her knuckled fist fall. No answer. She waited. She looked at her
watch: 7:00. She knocked again.
Miles rose but his
trick knee gave out and nose-dived him toward the floor before his pedestrian
leg compensated and he pulled himself up and limped to the door. The demonic (moronic
would better fit) doorman had informed him via intercom that Sarah was on her
way up. He hiked pants about waist, gentled his eyes, pulled an illusory cloak
of intent over his shoulders and opened the door to the perplexed ingenuousness
of a pretty young woman with flushed cheeks. He read the act. Scene one: Disarm
him with my provocative innocence. Not bad though and Miles contrived a smile
and held out his hand.
“Hello. You’re right
on time.”
Seeing he saw through
her she found herself saying before she had a chance to think of something more
sophisticated “Yes. Yes, I am.” As she extended her hand, a puff, a cloud, a
dulcet explosion of tissue paper, or a dove, swept out from his sleeve into the
air. “Oh!” she cried, and looked to him
for cue. Should she say ta da and lift her arms, flash white teeth,
halve a curtsy? Did he display his conjurative mettle for her benefit or was it
force of habit? an inadvertent ploy?
But he looked
bothered, even a little angry and she was confused.
“What the…” he
exclaimed as a second puff billowed out.
He shook the
diaphanous stuff from long fingers like a man ridding himself of – “Puzzle me
this…” he began.
She waited, off-balance, struggling to salvage
a fast slipping hold on reality and sanity. He hadn’t yet closed the door
behind her.
“I’m sorry,” he
said. “Sometimes this happens.” And he
examined his lithe fingers for residue. “Please come in and make yourself
comfortable.” He led her to a deep couch and indicated she should sit. “I’ll
get us something to drink. What will you have? Tea? Coffee? Apple juice?
Whatever you like.”
She sat and smoothed
the pants suit on her thighs. “Do you have any herbal tea?”
“Yes. Several kinds.
Do you have a preference?”
She thought she
detected British accent at first, but on listening closely she realized it was
his syntax and perfect elocution that gave that impression. He wasn’t wearing a
black turtleneck either, as she had expected. He wore clean rumpled ill-fit khaki
pants (Rumpelstiltskin ants) and a long-sleeved white shirt that was too large
for him in the shoulders, comfortable fresh white socks.
“This shouldn’t take
too long,” he called from the kitchen. “The water has been heating. Take a look
around if you like.”
She already had, the
moment he’d turned his back. She considered herself, like most women, an
aficionado of style and would hypothesize on a person’s character and
personality traits based on interior decoration. The couch was as luxurious as
a back rub. This eliminated ascetic, no hair-shirt for this wizard. Expensive
paintings hung on white brick walls. Bookcases filled a long wall. No
television, no radio, no sound system, yet classical piano, Chopin she guessed,
emitted from unseen speakers. He was
tall and she had neglected his age, the look of his face. Because he was thin
(most magicians were) gravity hadn’t dragged the flesh toward the earth that caringly
waited. He was 35? 40? 50? His hands were lithe and had spider-like command,
spoke with a language consonant with his own. But each was its own country.
He peeled waxed paper
from a bag of mint tea and dropped it into a cup and poured the boiling water,
his senses acute, the steam, the action, the color, the smell of the mint. She
was in his thoughts, but for the moment he did not consider her. He had
finally, after half a lifetime, found financial security and, if not his
calling exactly, then one that suited arcane talent. He could indulge in his
passion: the mind at rest. Meditation and Maya. The rest was dross…or nearly.
Death it was. He needed no analyst to tell him that, a longing for oblivion
after a compilation of pain enough. A stabbing heart attack and it would be
over, into the forgetful bliss of her arms, then lie for an eternity and not be
drawn back to Planet Earth.
The girl was bright
but she had cloaked it in her defensive act, the act of idiot imperious beauty
imposed by patriarchal coxswain, phallic social machination guiding her
desirability into passive acceptance of the dick. For god’s sake don’t prick the
illusion, the persona of male dominance. She rolls her eyes and opines “Who
little me?” Much better. That we can relate to, impregnate or abuse with good
conscience.
Max added honey the
applicant in his thoughts. She was easy on the eyes. The beauty did not
intimidate but invited the male for a closer look. And this vulnerability did
not precipitate a rattlebrained, superficial bimbo. She was too intelligent and
rebellious to succumb entirely, and too there was a gentleness of spirit born,
he saw, of adoring parents who allowed their daughter to taste the city in
hopes she would return but knew she would not. He saw this in the tea, his
tyrannical gift spewing vision unprovoked, unabated, providing no surcease from
the insight that had isolated him his entire life, flipped him on the bank from
the normal stream. No one wants to be understood, not city league redneck
bowlers who will remain rustic and believe they are enigmas. What you see is
what you get, they will say with arms open wide, big shit-eatin’ grins on their
mugs and beer in hand, but it is a ruse of these rubes.
He carried the tea
in. “Here we are,” he said, completely at ease, entirely in control because
although he was inclined to strip her clothes from her like a long-nailed chef
would peel an orange and bask in her nakedness and the fruit it contained, he
could control this impulse and speak to her mind and see her first as inhabiting
a vessel. She responded to this only
because he was a magician and employer. Though she would disagree, she wanted
to be desired at 26 more than she wanted to be taken seriously. She decided to
test him so she sipped the tea and darkened her eyes and laser-beamed out
sexual will and thought about his two testicular sacs. This never failed to
drive the high school boys into paralyzed embarrassment a minute before the
class bell rang releasing them into the halls,
their balls blue and aching.
“Is that enough honey
for you?” he asked quietly, but it wasn’t solicitude so much as it was to parry
her seduction. Feminine wiles fall flat on magicians. He took the opportunity
to regard her closely, studying the prospects of her sidekick performance on
stage where all the rules changed.
“Yes.” It’s fine. She
met his glance and occluded her depth, instinctively cast a moth’s wing
dalliance, but he had her wing in his teeth and held the eye and wrested
honesty from it before he loosed her. She felt as if a ghost had penetrated
her.
“Before we talk about
the job,” he said, raising the tea to his mouth and pausing. He blew hot
breath over it and propelled the steam and she braced herself for phenomenon of
unexpected type. He sipped. Nothing. She waited for him to say, Why don’t you
tell me something about yourself? But, she felt, he already knew quite a lot
about her. She didn’t think about innuendo, saying the job and blowing
over his hot tea, implied fellatio. She wasn’t getting that vibe from him.
He liked that she
wasn’t intimidated by his magic. Most were. The other interviewees projected a
fear of him he could not quell, though he would have liked to try a bit longer
with the buxom doe-eyed blonde who jumped every time a rabbit appeared. “Ha ha,
bunny,” she said, and couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there. Curiosity and
chutzpa drove this Sarah Maloney.
Sarah relaxed into
the deep couch, comfortable—she felt competent and restrained, empowered. This
wasn’t her though; it was the magician psychically fucking her. It was nice.
She watched him search for words, her eyes purged of deception and affectation.
He lifted an empty hand off the chair’s arm and an apple appeared suddenly in
it. She didn’t recoil but it nauseated her a bit, not the apple, the mockery of
physics, an explicable con sans explication.
“Before we discuss
the job…” he repeated, encouraged by her receptivity, and regarded the wooden
apple that had a moment before rested on the table between them. No break in
continuity from its spot on the table to his upraised hand, teleported
instantaneously. Maybe she had been hypnotized. His hand quicker than her eye? The
magician’s craft, the mesmerizing telepath and psychic. It was no magic at all
to put someone out and snap fingers to awaken. She had hypnotized (nature
provides defenses for the weak) a couple of aggressive slowwitted suitors who
had been sniffing at her crotch. Parental scruples had prevented her from sexually
enslaving them, dogs mindlessly lapping at her labia.
“Before we discuss
the job…” he said for the last time. “I would like your perception of magic.”
He steepled his hands over his mouth beneath his nose momentarily (the apple
was gone) and waited for her answer.
She was ready for
this one: she checked the dictionary. School-girlishly proud she answered:
“There is the production of illusions by sleight of hand. And there is a
tapping into supernatural forces with charms and spells.”
He looked at her as
if deciding something and he allowed the silence to grow while he stared—with
some effrontery, she thought. He wondered what it would be like to bed her, to
tap the novel her vulva shrouded. He looked away but now the silence took on
form. A shadow cast by no light grew perilously close.
Neither acknowledged
it but tacitly flouted their awareness of the wraith. They responded like two
who share a secret. He closely, subtly observed her reaction to what he lived
with, the ghoul, the dark side of knowledge without which knowledge does not
arrive. The terror, the anti-thesis, the antichrist, the opposition of every
position God and man create. He waited for her denial, and then her exit, as it
had happened with the buxom blonde, the brunette, all who could not accept. Ha
ha a bunny.
Oddly, she thought
about the gangsta boy and his swagger, pathetic fatherless lost soul. Her
compassion trumped her fear but, she thought, is my pity cowardice? The hypocrite
Christian’s (her parents were but she devotedly was not) substituting love and
mercy for responsibility and courage. Why didn’t she just hypnotize the rapist?
Did her terror crave and seek out that most horrible of sexual fantasies?
“You are right. There
are different aspects and definitions of magic. The audience of course realizes
the stage magician performs sleight of hand, regardless how fantastic the
trick…but there is always that doubt when they can’t see, when they are fooled,
the uneasy suspicion the magician has powers beyond their ken, that perhaps he
is in league with the devil.” He paused and looked at her.
She loved Satan with
all her heart but she was not evil. A misunderstood demon-boy who could touch
her deeper than the hypocrite, the innocent—the satyr knew her unspoken desire
and futilely strove to woo and wed her, to wood her. She creamed at his
philosophical betrayal. (She would marry the muscled solid job good father
Pudd-n-head white bread and live in the suburbs). What was the magic man trying
to tell her? She knew she was being tested but not how. There was no prepping
for this, no long-legged outstretched arm calling for applause where it was
due. She dropped more of her act and
reassessed him. Men indulge and women oblige. Cast into the background, into
ersatz subservience, they listen and watch and seek out other avenues of power
and discover truths within the male matrix that puncture the bloated display but
not overtly. Sex sex sex. It is accepted that the blood beef-fed penis muscle
rules, white seed progenitor of life, outer space comets (no coincidence here
of come and comet) sperming life into the dormant earth.
“I feel the same
way,” she said, her voice a lower, serious timbre.
The shadow faded. And
he debated explaining to her but explanations are gloss. He considered her
perceptive enough to absorb the lesson without words.
“And how is that?” He
asked sharp-edgedly, ratcheting up the heat, constraining his bilious, not predisposition,
rather sullenness. But it was controlled, calculated to provoke her, simulate
not stage but rehearsal (training) conditions. His art penetrated to the social
and psychological core and had no tolerance for redundant derivative
conservative platitudinous pathos-ridden crap. It was all frontier and
repetition, the exploration of the gone before.
She flushed. She felt
the job slipping away and was not sure why she thought this. Rita came to mind,
the fair-minded predictable Rita who would love to get in her subordinate’s
pants and was always insinuating herself into Sarah’s workspace, more each
time, until she could smell inside the perfume to the skin beneath the flesh.
She thought about the tedium and clockwatching, the cubicle, the endless stream
of non-fiction writers who knew someone, friends passing on names and
manuscripts to friends in the business. And then it came to her why she wanted
this job. She would write a book about the experience: The Magician’s
Assistant. Destiny beckoned, a word she loved to toss in front of her
suitors and watch the hope and fear sweep across their faces like clouds in
time-sequence photography. She looked in the magician’s face and met his eyes,
the magic word in her mind. She was the superior but the ice in his eyes
defused her. Not what she had expected. Old men longed for her carnal
innocence, the naughty girl in woman’s body of her. She was desired.
She went to lunch
with a married executive once who had fabricated an excuse: to discuss a book
she had proofread. He teased her with mention of editor jobs opening. But she
could see where he had wrested his wedding ring off. It was her first year with the company and
she hadn’t the worldliness to exploit him, to understand she could fuck him for
a promotion. Her moral dad came to mind when she read the lines on the boss’s
face, the soft (in retrospect unctuous) kindliness in his voice. Probably had
his dick up under the tablecloth the entire time.
Miles waited for her
stream of consciousness to lead eventually back to the matter at hand. She was
his last interview that day. He thought about the previous one, the other,
older woman, nearer his own spiritual age. There had been an affinity of intent
but a battling of wills. The spontaneous magic amused her but she dismissed it
as dabble.
“I really don’t know
why I’m here,” she confessed, not three feet over the threshold, the flowers
materializing in her arms.
“What do you do now?”
he had asked, ushering her to the couch, gingerly hauling the cat off the
cushion.
“I work in a
bookstore and sell herbal cures over the Internet.”
He saw her lost loves
and heartbreaks, her child, and more heartbreak. He was drawn to her strength
and raw-nerved sensitivity, to her tragedy, the purity condemned by reality,
the dreamy empathic utopian relic longing for a home eternally out of reach.
She had been an outcast, ostracized for lack of guile. The sharp poignancy, the
uncloying truth of her touched and warned him. The black widow comes unhinged
and multihued
“That people fear and
long for the devil,” Sarah finally answered, coming out of her seconds-long
trance. “I think they fear the dark promise in themselves.”
“What do you mean,”
Miles prompted her, sensing that ground gave way beneath her, that she voiced
meaning without conviction or empirical base.
“It’s all words and
empty meaning really. We have built a straw hut atop of a fireball.” She liked
the sound of this but it sounded too familiar. She remembered correcting “straw
hat” into “straw hut” in a book she had proofread.
Miles watched her
debate her own credibility. How she looked to him for reaction to her
intellect, the boobs and legs spouting what she worried was pedantry. Men didn’t like her showing off her
intellect. Well, Scott didn’t seem to mind when they sat and drank coffee in
the break room at 10:30 and discussed the books they had been working on. Shy
and suspicious as a crab, it had been a year before they spoke more than three
words to one another. Is the coffee hot? had been a breakthrough.
“I’m intrigued. Go
on.”
He might have been
intrigued about her but she saw her ideas posed nothing new to him and this
irritated her. Rather than backing down, she ploughed (two spellings: plow and
plough) foreword. “Our origin is bestial. Beelzebub is the beast. An
unrestrained id is anathema to moral society.”
“Yes. Yes.” Urging
her on. Goading her almost.
He should have
stopped her, she thought, and knew she later would regret the spill of words.
“We could have fucked and killed to our hearts content forever and it wouldn't
have made the slightest difference to the rock— ” she was channeling now. “Not
to animal gods. Not to any gods except the ones we imagine in our image to
build our civilization.” Who was she?
“Sad to say.”
“God is a word.”
“In the beginning was
the word.”
“And the word was
God.”
Next Bit
Exhausted, she sat in
satin in front of the television and watched late-night TV. Tomorrow she would
call in sick. Rita had seen she was vexed. Something had followed her home, not
temporal. She wanted to call Davis for cunninglingus. He would come. She ate rich
ice cream. She had to flush her system of him. She hated the fucking magician.
She hated God. Anyone who drew her away from her love of Satan—though she
believed herself good. The paradox would vex others but she resolved the
conflict: she was complex. Woman is the earth womb, she is dark moist fertile
absorbing seed and sabotaging spirit is her mission. Satan understands this and
exploits his earth power. God would turn the whole thing into a friggin’
spiritual fest so there’d be no consuming blackness to spawn. He said he would
let her know in a couple days. He said nothing about her legs, which she
thought were the salient criteria for hire.
A cat had come out of
another room, a shaggy unkempt fur-ball with the most disturbing human eyes
expressing suspicion of the deepest kind, rousing violent antipathy in her,
even, she thought, jealousy.
“What do you want?”
the magician asked.
Sarah was about to
say 1000 dollars a week but he had spoken to the cat. His tone wasn’t the fatuous
sentiment of owner’s for pampered fiend. He spoke in an equal tone as if to a
human. The cat ignored him, big surprise, and leaped on a chair to face her. No
manners, thrust its essence at her. Are you the familiar? she silently asked.
Fuming now and not knowing why she replayed the interview over in her head,
trying to recall the minutest details, remembering what she said and the tone
she believed she had said it in. He was sadistically serene the whole time and
she liked him enormously and was no nearer to determining his age. One moment
he was thirty-five, the next sixty. It was the eyes. That acceptance in them. The asexuality he wielded like a wand upset
her equilibrium. Safe now she understood that. No! no longer safe…for whatever
had followed her home had entered and now lay in the corner. The cat’s shadow
maybe or that black wraith she damned near freaked out over. Part of the test,
she reasoned. If the magician wasn’t concerned, why should she be?
His tea had warmed and
imbued her with lucidity and liberated her tongue. They talked more about the
nature of good and evil and magic and how it spanned the two—but that evil was
empty construct, as was good, more words devised by the social organism to
evolve. He intimated that his magic spanned two realms, not of good and evil,
but the supernatural and mundane. A turtledove, as docile as a marshmallow, flapped
on her shoulder and she wondered why the cat didn’t kill it for sport.
“He’s too
preoccupied,” he said.
“Who?”
“The cat. I could see
you wondered about that. No trick. No telepathy. Just observation.”
He said the quicker
the mind the quicker the hands. They go hand in hand. And if the speed
increases super-humanly then the line between the supernatural and the natural is
blurred.
“After all, it’s
speed. What’s a ghost but vibrating speed? What is matter but vibrating speed?”
Would that explain
Meth?
She knew this and he
backed off his spiel. He hated to bore. It was abhorrent to him. No one should
have to listen to him. It was better to watch, so he performed (what she
thought was…) a gratuitous magic trick to compensate for his not being “on.” It
was the first weakness she discovered in him and she felt selfishly better. No
one appreciates excellence in others, not in person. Hallelujah to the saints.
They are inspiring models (yokels) but who would want to live with one.
Quietude is not passion and she loved the passionate.
He had both distaste
and respect for his audience and kept them at a distance, the same
psychological barrier between psychiatrist and patient. She could tell though
it was more than reservation he held for them. A guttural snarl escaped him but
she could affix no meaning. At the fat cat? She tried to reproduce it in her throat:
rrrgh. And in the audience tonight we have the esteemed…rrrgh
She sat buried in her
couch watching late-night television and snarled at comedic monologues. She
switched channels back and forth between cult and non-cult. Rrrgh. One was and
one wasn’t. Tonight she didn’t know who she was in the mood for. The cult spoke
to her need but they get so tedious, so narrow-minded, in the end, blockaded.
She called for Chinese take-out.
Miles
Downs Some Brewskis
After the last
interview Miles pulled on a gray sweatshirt and a baseball cap with the bill
low and walked out of the apartment and exited into the back alley on the first
floor because he didn’t want to expend energy ignoring the doorman. A black
mood had descended on him like a tomb
A tomcat, one eye scarred and nearly shut, its
fur in grizzled tufts, pawed at a chicken bone and cast a menacing and fearless
eye at Miles.
“Hey tough guy,”
Miles said and imagined the life of a lonely, self-reliant tom who laid what
and when he could and had no friends. “We are not that unalike you and I. Only
I get rarely laid.”
Tough shit. Don’t whine
to me asshole. Look at my ears, torn to
shreds. My 26 diseases.
At alley’s end he
turned right and head down, hugging the buildings, disassociated, walked ten
blocks to an Irish bar where he unobtrusively ordered a Sam Adams and watched a
baseball game on overhead TV. After the first beer his muscles relaxed and into
the second he settled into the dark anonymity of the bar and felt comfortable
enough to look around and see who else had retreated to this hard, no frills
asylum, magic nothing more than frill. Huddled figures hunkered over beers in
pairs or alone. The bartender was a bald, detached middle-aged ex-boxer with a
thick black moustache who abided small talk but had no understanding, no truck
with philosophy. In the kitchen was the cook and owner’s daughter, Katie, who
knew Miles from years of patronage. She helped out with the bartending when it
got busy, which wasn’t often, or when she felt like being sociable with one of
the tightlipped denizens—which wasn’t often.
“Hello Miles,” Katie
said to him. “How’s tricks?” she loved asking him.
“Hello Katie.”
“You look down.”
They had had their
short-lived fling six months after her husband’s suicide.
“He was never a happy
man,” she explained.
“That’s not what
pushes us over the edge,” Miles commiserated.
“What is?” It was
late and Larry the ex-bouncer had gone and the two were left alone in the bar
drinking Jack Daniel’s on ice and not getting drunk, but philosophic.
“It’s when the pain
of life exceeds the fear of death.”
“What had he to be
pained about? We weren’t a combative pair.” But it was hypothetical. Miles
stayed silent and took hold of the bottle as if it were a hand and he looked at
her from beneath his magician’s brow.
“You are still a
young and beautiful woman,” he said, which she had remained in his besotted
mind. His only magic in the bar was his words and the disappearance of napkin
coasters and 20-dollar bills. Which hand is it in?
“I know this one,”
she admitted. “The left.”
He drank the third
Sam Adams, rabblerousing son of liberty, and that was his limit and he looked
at Katie who waited for him speak and he realized he would use her, but that’s
what they were: throw rugs and old quilts. When she had laid her hand on his
those three years ago and said “Why don’t you take my clothes off and lay me
down?” he had had no argument but it would have been mournful and ill-advised.
And he would never again be able to come in the bar once the crystal was
broken. So he thought at the time, but magic, if it is not abused or overused
for private gain, can accomplish much. And it did.
“What is it you need,
Miles?” she now asked.
He squeezed his nose
shut with thumb and forefinger, his elbow on the bar and, met with her stiff
sobriety, he had no wit, ironic here. She had lost her patience with him.
“You seek out the
company of women but dig a fire line.”
He let her strike to
her advantage. He could not explain what his interest in her would bring down
upon her, the moment his heart opened. He did not know her well enough to wound
her.
“Why did you create
me?
“What?”
“In this so-called
Irish bar. I’m the weathered, mother-figure colleen. Is that it? Do you want to
portray your easy and familiar way with women? A foul mood lays hold of you and
you skulk to the dark impermanence of a bastion for brooding male company and
the gentle womanhood such as myself. This is to be your salve? There’s too much
irresolution here, my trickster.”
“Katie.”
“My name is Linda and
I’m not Irish.”
“I would lay you down
again.”
“But?”
Miles nodded in the
direction of the door where a figure had just entered, a stranger with no
history who gazed at Katie so that she understood he was her social death, her
financial ruin.
“Who is that?” she
asked Miles though she knew.
“I could kill him and
a hundred like him but it would do no good until you can too.”
“You are speaking in
riddles, magician.”
“You know that’s what
I do.”
The
Next Day at Work
She didn’t want to be
there. It dragged. She noticed more how Rita would find excuses to hover over
her. It had been subtle, the black woman hitting on her over the last several
months, but now Sarah saw through it more clearly, and through herself. It was
flattering. And she thought it would provide some job security if she went
along. This, she realized, had been an almost subconscious act of survival. But
the magician filled her thoughts, that smooth and easy way he had but none of
the bounder’s vanity and cunning. Her previous evening’s hate had transformed
into an ache.
The book would never
end. Aftermath of Upheaval. Non-fiction by a scientist who forecast
doomsday scenario not by war or alien invasion but by disease and natural
disaster. The sanitary condition of overcrowded Third World cites and countries
would spark massive epidemics. Cataclysmic, climate- and economic-altering
events would exacerbate the catastrophe. When first world medical teams and
volunteers return to their own countries, they pass on hitherto unknown and fatal
viruses. Disease precipitated panic and anarchy.
“How’s it going?”
Rita hovered over her cubicle. The Black woman must have sensed that flight was
imminent. The proofreader didn’t look at her, didn’t lead her on. She called
Miles to mind. Proofreading was dross. She couldn’t think. Couldn’t feel.
Chains hung from her neck and she felt she was dying. Rita was an oppressive
presence blocking light. Nausea clawed up and down her throat. She stood and
said “Excuse me” and brushed past Rita and left. She took a bus to her
apartment where she turned off her phones and cleaned for hours. She swept, dusted,
scrubbed, washed. She emptied the refrigerator and wiped the shelves, scoured
the oven, sanitized the toilet, threw out worthless paperwork, did a laundry,
changed the sheets, deleted cookies from her computer hard drive. It took her
three hours and at the end she took a 20-minute shower, got out, and wondered
what she was going to do with her life. Have a baby was the dictate. Have a
baby was the dictate. Have a baby was the dictate. Maybe she would have a baby.
She didn’t want it to be Davis’s. He had no more ambition than delivering pizza
and seducing lonely horny twat-itching gals. She dished herself out a giant
scoop of ice cream and pulled a family quilt over her naked body and buried
herself in the couch and waited for the phone to ring. It was Miles.
“Can you come back
for a second interview?”
He had winnowed it
down to two, Sarah and the Internet herb seller who really didn’t want the job
but who upon leaving the apartment had said “Call me.” His gift had come up
blank. Did she mean call her for a follow-up interview or call her because she
was interested in him romantically? She meanwhile unraveled the mystery of her
dying beaus…not beans, beaus. The n is
upside down.
Gentle
Abstraction
She loved her husband
and had her daughter with him but when the girl was ten he died in a bizarre
accident that strained and fortified her faith. The picture now, after 20 years
was beginning to clear. She first of all had to recognize the spiritual beauty
of herself…know that she was unique, one of a chosen stock, by fortune blessed
and damned. The love of a woman will overwhelm a man. Is this why she withholds
her heart? So she will not kill the seed before it is in her?
Five years into
widowhood she dated a man. The affair lasted three years and they spoke of
marriage and had set a date when he died in an automobile accident. She better
understood love with this man, that it was not a dictator she was willingly
subject to. Love could be controlled and denied. For the next five years she
denied it, turned forty and foolishly, she knew in her heart, allowed a man get
close enough to her to fall in love. Him. Not her. He fell in love with her. He
came into the bookstore occasionally and purchased eclectic fare: Stock
Investment. Mystic Healing. Herbal Care of Horses. It
wasn’t until he bought Managing Relationships that it dawned that he
wooed her. He figured out her shifts and came in at those times. He was older,
54, but slim with good color. He wore expensive clothing that didn’t appear so.
It was casual but the shoes gave him away. And she saw him leave the parking
lot in a late model BMW.
When she agreed to go
out with him after he finally asked, he looked vaguely apologetic about the
car’s expense but said nothing about it. He opened the door for her and as he
closed it she sensed he was treating her too delicately, that she was a flower
or the porcelain urn, that her emotions were strung tauter than a violin. This
mistake is made about those with a capacity for love and compassion: that these
qualities are enervating. The emotion is inherently delicate but nature
compensates and imbues deeper, invisible strength. She was aware of her
strength but others failed to see it. They could wound with impunity, but she
could not, except to abandon the strength which might better be called faith.
But faith implies belief and she had no particular spiritual or religious
anchor.
They went to a movie
though she preferred a simple dinner in a quiet restaurant where she could better
get to know him. It was a romantic comedy and he laughed out loud three or four
times and she liked the unforced sound of it. It seemed to her at times that he
wasn’t there with her, that he sat alone, whether through long habitude or his
involvement in the movie. She cast
sidelong looks at him and appreciated his jaw line and long straight nose and
couldn’t help but wonder if the axiom were true about long nose and long penis.
She might find out but not that evening. His smell allowed the possibility, not
the scent of cologne but clean scrubbed flesh that exhaled no toxins. She could
smell that he ate with health in mind. He smelled so good she wanted to eat him,
and she thought about those female insects and animals that ate the mating male
afterward and she knew it was out of love. The female could not contain its
love and had no more perfect way to express it. Is this what she had done to
her lovers…each one dying not by accident as it appeared, but by the design of
her subconscious will.
They drove for coffee
afterward and the news came on:
“The young man was
eaten by a fifteen foot croc while crossing the river with his companion.”
Her date said how
terrible, visibly moved as if he knew the man. “Can you imagine such a death?”
Since her universe was run by design and meaning she had to rationalize the unspeakable horror. But he could not.