"It's time," I tell Ali as we drive over the train tracks. "It happens every year." The windows are down in the car. An oak leaf brown and cracked as old parchment flies in and she has to brush it out of her hair.
"What happens?" she asks.
"The boundaries get less...distinct." I'm hunting for words, trying to draw what I mean in the air. "The borders are more porous now, you know?" I'm not scared she'll laugh.
"You mean the borders between the worlds?"
I nod. I knew she'd understand. "I can actually feel it," I say, "Or at least I think I do. Something in the wind this time of year. I don't think Halloween or Samhain or the Day of the Dead or whatever, I don't think the date for that was chosen arbitrarily. I think the spirit world really is a little closer right now."
Lafayette Park is one of St. Louis' most beautiful, and a "soft place," as Neil Gaiman would call it. You go in and the year is not the same year you left and the St. Louis is not the same one you left. You feel at home in it, though. At least I do.
I'm early for a lunch appointment at Arcelia's, a Mexican restaurant on the corner of the Park. It's a beautiful fall day. This city has horrid weather--summer days so hot and humid they suck out all my energy, winter days of giant snowstorms or showers of ice and windchills that burn my cheeks and ears. But there can be up to five perfect days in the fall that make the other 360 worth it, and this is one of them.
I walk through the stone gate into Lafayette Park. It has been a long time since I've been inside this gate--months and months. The blue sky and crisp autumn air help my mood rise from cheerful to buoyant, though there are many reasons I could be down. I know any day now the war is going to begin, but my mind is sick of anything to do with that. A squirrel gnaws on red berries in a small dogwood tree. I surprise him and he jumps from its branches to a basswood.
I walk to the pond. It is bordered by beds of the sort of flowers that form multihued carpets low to the ground, and a small iron bridge crosses over it. Very Victorian. The air has been dry lately; the pond is little more than a marsh. I am remembering a day more than a decade back when the water was sparkling and the whole landscape was so beautiful my breath caught in my throat. I'd walked to the pond with Stephanie, whom I was babysitting. She was six or seven and an odd child, and I was an odd babysitter. We both believed in unseeable things and could feel magic quite clearly in this park. When we got to the pond she trained her eyes on the far side and whispered "A unicorn!" I never, never knew at times like this whether or not she was playing "let's pretend," and I never asked her. Especially in this case, where I might have played along and exclaimed over the beauty of the flashing hooves and the tail white as an angel's feather, I instead expressed my regret that the sight was not given to me. I wanted her to be seeing what I couldn't.
That's what I'm thinking back on when there is a commotion in the marsh. A large crow is harrying another bird. Its victim is as large but not dark. When it gives a short, screeching rebuke and flies into the dogwood I realize what it is. A hawk. I stare up at it like I'm witnessing a religious vision, which in a way I am. A vision, anyway. I try getting closer, but it's as if the crow finds the hawk because of me. It flies at the tree like a missile and the hawk glides off into a maple across the field. I follow, staring into the tree with an intensity that no doubt alarms those walking their dogs or jogging through the park. But I don't see the hawk again.
What I saw bothers me in a part of my spirit I'd long been ignoring. I've whiled away my time endlessly playing CDs, writing articles, wondering if the rattle in my car is serious, and playing on the Internet. This time of year something in the wind pulls me toward that deep strange wildness underneath negotiating the ordinary. But I always find a reason not to examine that whatever-it-is--duty calls, the phone rings and it's my friend Reiko telling me her latest theory of why Princess Diana is still alive. Or the problem with the car is something called the "struts" and it'll cost $500 to fix it.
I walk around the park trying to convince myself that seeing the hawk meant nothing, or that if it did mean something it was positive, that I shouldn't worry about the crow in pursuit. I live in the city and rarely see hawks, but they are my favorite animals, so when I see one I like to think of it as a good omen. That is the easy explanation. I go to my lunch meeting and happily chat about radio and the music industry and other such worldly matters.
Three days pass. I work my weekend job at the City Museum. I have a good day. I sell many corn dogs and candy bars, sodas and whoopee cushions; on top of that a cute boy flirts with me and leaves his phone number, something that hasn't happened in a pathetically long time. So, again, I'm in a good mood. As I walk into the parking lot my gaze lands on a tiny blue plastic cocktail sword resting on the asphalt. I nearly pass it by. But I stop, crouch down, pick it up, hold it to the light. The transparent blue of it flashes in the sun and the point nearly pricks my finger.
"All right," I say, to the one who has to be listening. "I'm paying attention now. Is that all I'm supposed to do? You're weirding me out." There is no answer. I drive home troubled and more than a little scared.
See, many many years ago I invented a strange story that involved a hawk and a blue plastic cocktail sword. It is the sort of story that grows more complicated the more years pass; I have never been able to commit it to paper in its entirety. I feel like it is too immense for my talents to capture. The root of it probably dates back to when I was nine or so. That fact in itself makes retelling this thing a challenge. It was pure story back then, which is to say, it was cobbled together out of anything that inspired me--Saturday morning cartoons, Egyptian mythology, and interesting objects found around the house. For many years it bothered me that there was so much in the story that was not original, not my own creation. But I've come to look at it another way. Children can glean out the fundamental truths in the stories they hear, the myths that power the culture. When something they come in contact with--Saturday morning cartoon or whatever--contains an element of one of these myths, that is what resonates with them, that is what they like. And so what I was doing by stealing ideas from everything around me was creating a myth for myself. And a myth is very, very hard to write down.
It is even harder to deal with a myth that forces itself up into the "real world." The hawk in Lafayette Park was battling a crow; the hawk in the story that's been in my head the last seventeen years does the same thing. The blue plastic sword in the parking lot was a twin to a blue plastic sword I found in my house, dubbed "The Sapphire Sword" and called my mythic hawk's magical weapon. When a story intrudes so radically and insistently into life, one has little choice but to deal with it. The question then becomes, "how?"
For a week I do little but play Solitaire on my computer and work on other matters, all the while knowing what I need to do most is to devote time to the mystery, and that time is short. It is several weeks before Halloween. And I instinctively know Halloween is my cutoff date. The pagan part of me that can feel the membrane between the worlds grow thin and porous as the day of the dead approaches also knows that come November 1st, traffic between spirits and matter-bound is rare once again. Whatever needs doing has to be done before All Saints Day.
The only thing I can think to do is write a story. That is where my hawk lives, not in this world but in the imagined. Made up. Did you ever stop to think of it--we don't refer to stories as "made," but as "made up." A face is made up; there is something solid there already and it is just embellished upon. So too the story. It must already be somewhere; it just needs to be made up with words. Somewhere my hawk, who is sometimes a woman, who in whatever form is named Ka-Re, wants to tell me something. I have to meet her in a story to find out what it is.
I need a setting. To meet a friend you must choose a meeting place. I think at once of Lafayette Park. It is real enough to me that I could place myself there in my imagination, and yet seems to exist on the threshold of the unreal. Stephanie's sighting of a unicorn at the pond was only one of many odd encounters I've known of in that park over the years. Once Stephanie and I were walking in the park, just talking, and not of anything magical either, when we saw a swan in our path about twenty paces ahead. We both saw it, were both quite sure it was a swan, neither of us feeling any reason to doubt our eyes. As we got closer we said it was strange that the swan wasn't moving away. And then, as surely as we had seen earlier it was a swan--neither more nor less--we saw it was a white plastic bag which started to blow away. Someone else might have said it had been a plastic bag all along, but we found it awfully suspicious that we had both been so convinced of its swanness, and that the shift to plastic bagness had been so sudden.
Another time we were playing Frisbee near the lake where some ducks were idly swimming away their lives. We were doing poorly at our game. We heard cruel, malicious sounding laughter--"Aaah-HA-HA-HA-HA!" It was coming from the ducks. Again, someone else might have thought the ducks' calls just happened to sound like human laughter. But why had it started just as our Frisbee throws boucing down the field, yards off target?
And, of course, Lafayette was where I'd seen the hawk attacked by the crow. If Ka-Re was going to choose our rendezvous location, who was I to argue?
So--I imagine a mythical Lafayette Park in the fall: trees aflame with color bright as phoenix wings, weeping willows trailing their branches like regret, wrought iron fences shutting out the ordinary. In my mind I walk paths strewn with the fallen stars that are sweetgum leaves until I reach again the bridge and the pond. Here is a bank of moss and jagged limestone rocks; above it are the supports of the bridge, stout pillars each marked with a six-pointed gold star in a gold circle. I sit in the shade of a willow tree and wait, watching the breeze shift on the water. I imagine more water in the pond than what I'd last seen there.
And then I give up. I remember I live only a short distance away from the real Lafayette--why try to construct one in my head? After fortifying myself with a lunch of pizza I drive down the highway. A nicely odd David Bowie tape keeps me company. In minutes I sit where sunlight gleams green through the willow tree and bounces on the water, setting off kaleidoscope patterns on the underside of the bridge. The pond isn't a marsh today after all.
Now I have only to imagine Ka-Re. She'd come walking toward me down the grassy slope at my left--a tall woman of indeterminate age with toffee-colored skin, black hair styled like she's stepped from a heiroglyphic. She'd face the sun as she would walk but she would not flinch. The sun would glint off her black pearl eyes. Her royal blue dress would drape round her well and the long skirt would brush the ankles of her sandalled feet. She would wear a cape, too, and as she approached I would make out a stylized hawk face on the hood.
I conjure all this while cardinals argue and a squirrel bends to drink from the pond. I imagine myself standing and dropping a clumsy curtsy for my visitor. In the myth she is royalty.
"I am glad you are here," she says, before leading me to wood bench in the gazebo on the hill overlooking the pond. We walk on stones and a dragonfly crosses our path. Our arrival at the gazebo frightens away another squirrel who had been scavenging among the black-eyed susans. It is cooler here in the shade.
She sits on the bench next to me, seemingly oblivious to its dust and dirt. I look at her expectantly.
"You're wondering what I want from you," she says.
"Yes, your Majesty."
"No need to be formal."
"Yes, Ka-Re."
She looks out over the pond, the pitted rocks stacked around wildflower beds, the leaves showering down after a heavy wind. "This isn't easy for you anymore, is it?" she says at last. "Seeing what's not there."
"No," I admit. "It's frustrated me. Though I can hear your voice if I concentrate hard enough. I don't know if the seeing bit's a talent I've lost, or if I never really had it. I'm not sure I ever saw you clearly in any picture in my head."
She nods. I make a point of noting the movement. When she nods the eyes of the hawk on her hood are level with mine. The beak looks sharp and I wonder that it doesn't cut into Ka-Re's forehead.
"So hearing me is difficult too?"
"Mostly because I'm not sure what you want to say. I have an idea, but I don't know how you'd broach the subject."
"You'd rather I just launch into it." It's a statement, not a question, but I answer anyway.
"Yes. How am I supposed to make up small talk with someone like you?"
She smiles, but she seems distracted. With an abrupt motion that would startle me if this were real, she leans in like a conspirator. "No small talk, then. Listen hard as you can. There is something you need to find out."
She searches my eyes for a response. "I'm listening," I say, but she has gotten distracted again, running her fingers over the weatherworn surface of the bench, turning to watch a rabbit hop behind us.
"You're right." Her words come out slowly. "It isn't easy to begin. Maybe some of it needs to be in your words. How well do you know me? What do you know about me?"
I huddle in my jacket as the wind picks up. "Your name is Ka-Re," I begin, "which may or may not have been the first name I gave you. When I was a little girl I drew a hawk with its wings raised over its head, a sun disk cradled between the wing tips. I put a name under the picture, something vaguely Egyptian."
"Go on."
"It was a hawk who, if it raised its wings until the tips touched, would be transformed into a woman, like an old story I'd heard about the Chinese Phoenix. And the woman, raising her arms like wings until her fingertips met above her head, could become the hawk again. But I lost the picture and forgot the name. I decided later 'Ka-Re' sounded right, and you've been Ka-Re ever since."
"There's more than this," she remarks with a half-smile when I pause.
"Some of it a little embarrassing," I add, my head bent over my feet as I idly kick them. "This all started when I was in grade school. I'd make up Ka-Re stories at home, but I acted them out at recess too. The girls in the playground were always acting out grandiose dramas based on horror movies and such. Heaven only knows how I convinced any of them to participate in my Ka-Re theatre, but I did. And soon you had daughters, granddaughters--a whole clan based on my need to include everyone who wanted to play. Your mother was the Phoenix. Your grandmother was the sun. Your enemy a witch who could take the form of a crow."
She starts at the mention of Kahtah. "But the embarrassment?" she presses.
"I had thought the girls enjoyed the game. I'm not sure what happened. Maybe I threw myself too wholeheartedly into your role, flapping my arms and crying my hawk cries across the playground. Because a couple of years later--it wasn't right away, I do remember that--the same girls who had played the game were accusing me of thinking I could fly. One girl told the others she'd passed my house and saw me flapping my arms around the living room. Which may have been true, by the way."
Ka-Re shrugs her shoulders, expressing no judgment.
"And the more I protested it was all a game, the more they knew they'd succeeded in rattling me. I had to live down the nickname 'Bird' until graduation."
Ka-Re laughs. I glare. "It still bothers you," she observes.
It's my turn to shrug. "Just stupid grade school stuff. To be honest I had it easy. I know people who went through hell in grade school. And I can't blame the girls for not knowing what to make of me. A kid flapping her arms around at recess is a goofy sight, even if in her head she's some quasi-Egyptian superhero. Especially if, I should say."
The quasi-Egyptian superhero in question betrays no emotion. "Tell me of my powers."
"You have a weapon. No, wait--it's more complicated. We have to back up. These are the things I'm not sure I have totally sorted out. I don't even have anything as basic as your age."
"What do you guess is my age?"
"Around two hundred years old, give or take a half century. Some say the Phoenix lives a thousand years, some say five hundred, but then, you're not the Phoenix. You were hatched at the same time, from the same nest, but there can only be one Phoenix, so you're something else. So I also don't know when you'll die."
She isn't blinking as she studies my face. I find this disconcerting. "You thought of all this in grade school?"
"No. When I got older I wanted to make stories out of the games I'd played so I started trying to sort out some details. That's when I discovered what I had built into your legend was very rich. You have a lot of meaning for me. But there is so much wealth it takes a long time to give all the details. And, again, I don't know how all the details fit.
"A few minutes ago you said I needed to find something out. I presume you were referring to one of these parts of your story I haven't hammered down yet."
She angles her face away from mine as though to physically deflect the question. "What keeps these details from being sorted out?"
"It's not from lack of trying," I say, getting up and tugging at some grass at the edge of the gazebo. "Every few years I start writing another story about you--or usually the same story told in a slightly different way--but either I never finish it or it is somehow unsatisfying."
"May I speculate about what goes wrong?" she asks.
"Sure. You'd know more about this than I would."
"Maybe it is very difficult to learn the details you need to learn. Maybe--" she appears to hunt for the right word. "Maybe painful. You've never before been able to ask the hardest questions."
"And you think I can ask them now?"
"You _need_ to ask them now." She walks over to where I sit on my haunches. Her hand presses on my shoulder. I feel like I'm being deputized. "Angela." I know at once this is the first time she's used my name in our conversation. It sounds like the first time anyone has ever said it. "You keep trying to tell _my_ story, but to do that you must understand someone else's story a lot better than you do. And it's very, very important that you work on doing so."
"Someone else? Who? There are so many minor characters around you--Sayk, Ayrt, Tay-ee-Re, Ahkohr, Sihl, Ellen and Shasta and the cardinal and the fox--"
"Not a minor character."
"Oh. Of course. Kahtah."
"Walk with me," she requests. I see that once again the mention of her enemy troubles her. She scans the sky and trees as we walk but there are no crows. "Tell me what you know about my enemy."
"She's gone by other names," I say as we descend the hill and head toward the malicious ducks. "I think first I called her 'Crowell,' then I decided that was a stupid name. I tried different variations on that until one day I found this book on world religions. In a section on Celtic mythology it listed some of their more macabre goddesses. It said there were some goddesses who haunted battlefields and appeared as hags or as birds, and one of them was called Badb Catha, Battle Crow. So I renamed Crowell Kahtah. In my stories I had always pictured other witches assisting her. When I read that another of the goddesses was Nemain--Panic--it fit."
"'Panic'--that's related to 'terror', isn't it?" Her voice is casual, but I stop walking.
"I get it. I get why you were anxious to get my attention. Why now, of all times."
"But not so you would chase after Panic. So you would learn about the one who commands her."
"Kahtah."
"Names have power," she says in a warning tone.
"You want me to find her, right?" I snap. "What's wrong with summoning her?"
"You have no need. You know where she is."
Once again the sun is in her eyes and she is not shielding her face or squinting. The tiny reflected suns in her dark irises make them shine like star sapphires. I cannot look at her directly without my eyes hurting. "You're right," I answer, nodding slowly. "I do."
"I should go," she says. But she just stands there. Finally she quirks a half-smile. "You have to let me go, remember? I'm not here."
"I guess I have gotten better at imagining you," I say apologetically. She bows a farewell and I return the gesture, already focusing my attention on the lake behind her. Soon all I see is the lake; no one stands in front of it.
Will you PLEASE write a Novel!!!???
Posted by: artist at September 15, 2003 07:36 PM