Christopher O'Riley cheerfully admits he has a Radiohead obsession. Some people have it worse; he mentions he knows "maybe a dozen" fans of the band who just go around the world attending their concerts. "Obviously, they've got their priorities right!" he laughs--but maybe he's not kidding.
Maybe he'd join them if he could, but he can't, because he's giving concerts of his own. Of Radiohead songs.
O'Riley, a classical pianist, will present his "Radiohead Transcriptions" at the Sheldon Concert Hall Thursday, September 25. This concert comes on the heels of the release of True Love Waits, his album of solo piano pieces with the entertainingly formal credit: "All Tracks Written By Thomas Yorke, Jonathan Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Philip Selway, Edward O?Brien."
Read the rest here.
The home computer is making funny noises. Just in case you're wondering where I went.
My sister arranges for another babysitter so I can go see the opera she's starring in. I'm to meet her friend Cindy at the door of the State Theatre and give her the other ticket. While I wait for her I amuse myself by scanning the crowd. One woman has come for the All Hallows Eve Eve performance wearing a black and orange feather boa. A whole pack of priests arrives, six or seven Roman collars. I idly wonder what the appropriate collective noun would be until it hits me that, of course, I should call it a mass of priests.
Then Cindy appears. She took lessons at the same time my sister did in Chicago; currently she's the soprano understudy at the Met and that's what's brought her to town. Opera singers have complicated social lives but they are bound to run into each other every so often. Cindy is petite, pretty, vivacious, highly outgoing, the sort of person I take to immediately. We make opera-related small talk (I can fake it with the best of them) and I anticipate a pleasant evening.
Before we go in she says, "I need to call my husband. We've been having problems with our internet access and I should check in." She flips open a cell phone and dials. I wait. "Hi...Angela says the first act is an hour and 45 minutes. Should I call back at intermission and walk you through the setup?...No, what?...I haven't heard anything, what have you heard?...Madison Square Garden? Not far enough."
I look at her. "What is it?" I ask.
She looks at me, her eyes wide and serious. She speaks into the phone with a sudden note of authority in her voice. "Okay. In that case, I'll grab them both and get the hell out of here."
"What happened?" I croak. She just clutches my arm, this woman I've never met, and says into the phone, "It's a stone building, would that help? Wouldn't it have to be lead-lined?"
For a horrible, horrible thirty seconds while she finishes her conversation I am certain the bomb has already gone off and the black wind is sweeping toward us and we are the only ones in the whole theatre who know and there is nothing to be done, how can you move faster than an explosion? But still I am ready to make the run for it, I know the way to the dressing room, we will have to get my sister in full costume and tear out of here, grab my nephew...I have no clear idea what we will do next.
Cindy gets off the phone. "Nothing's happened," she reassures me. Then she says, "The rumor is that with Michael Jordan at Madison Square Garden and the President in town for the Yankees game, this is the night they're gonna do something. They say 11:30--I don't know why--and that it's gonna be a small nuke."
I feel the surroundings burning themselves into my memory so I'll always have a clear image of where I was when I found out the world was coming to an end. We're standing in front of a curved wall--it's grey and has a rough texture, like a raked Japanese sand garden. We're standing on wine colored carpet surrounded by ugly statues. Priests are walking by. Cindy puts her hand to my back and we head for our seats.
She mentions her husband said Halloween's the other possible date for an attack.
"No use in worrying about it," I hear my voice saying.
"There's nothing we could do anyway, if something happens," she agrees. She sounds lighthearted but her tone jumps up and down in all the wrong places, like she has just learned to talk.
My first reaction might seem strange to anyone who did not grow up during the Cold War's last gasp. I can't help but associate a nuclear attack with the end of the world. It is part of my conditioning. Thanks presumably to Ronald Reagan, in my mind a nuclear bomb equals World War Three equals Apocalypse.
Now, a part of me has always hoped I'd be on the planet to witness the end of time, the sky curling up on itself like a torn scroll, all of that. Who knows why. Self-centeredness, perhaps--if I have to go I want everyone else to go with me. But here at three and half hours left on the countdown I am suddenly, startlingly, hopelessly in love with Earth, everyone and everything on it. All I want is for someone to please tell me the grand madness isn't over yet. It's so beautiful. It can't die.
Gradually my viewpoint shifts. A small nuke, Cindy said. My Cold War-conditioned brain thinks that's a contradiction in terms, but what if it isn't? What if the world doesn't come to an end? What if all we lose is New York City?
Thanks to this line of reasoning, for the first time on this whole trip I absolutely regret coming here. I am desperate to be in St. Louis. Good old, boring, of-no-interest-to-terrorists St. Louis. Fallout wouldn't travel that far, would it? Can I get a plane out of New York tomorrow? Will my sister disregard the rumors and elect to stay for her final performances? Will anyone even come to operas when they think a nuclear bomb will hit New York?
The seats are filling up around us. Cindy is talking about something inconsequential. I try to listen but with every movement of air I'm expecting fallout wind to come whipping past my face like the wind the subway trains push through the tunnels. I think of the goodbyes I wish I could be saying and entertain the thought of borrowing Cindy's cellphone to call Mom, to call Jim, Stephanie, Ali, Reiko...There are too many. There's too much to say. Three and a half hours--three and a half years wouldn't be enough.
I'm trying very hard not to give in to panic. I think, "Perfect love casts out fear." I whisper it to myself like a mantra. But I'm still jumpy as hell. I see a flash out of the corner of my eye and I think it's the bright explosion seen through a chink in the building. It's an usher using a flashlight to guide someone to his seat.
The opera begins. The first character on stage is Human Frailty, a longhaired blond countertenor clad in a loincloth. On a normal night I'd be amused by this. Instead I feel deep, deep pity as he sings a quavering line about how mortals get tossed about by forces they can't control. Above him looms Fortuna, her spinning wheel a glittering mirrorball in this production. She sings a gloating song of how she distributes pleasure and pain at her whim.
Her voice is supplanted by Kahtah's. "Go on. Ask me. Go on. Ask me if I have finally won the unbreakable sword."
My greatest fear. "You told me I'm in love with destruction," I say to her. "But I read about what happened at Hiroshima and I found very little beauty in that, whatever you may think."
"I remember you reading about it. You were fascinated by the way the flash of the explosion burned shadows of people and buildings so they could still be seen years later."
I don't answer.
"Do you want to know my victory song?" Her voice is a wasteland. "If I have the sword I will want a victory song. There are no bards anymore but I remember the precision of their meter.
'She, the haunter of battlefields, she,
Whose cries are harsh music, she,
Fatal wind lover,
Lover of shadows scorched in the ground.'"
"'Perfect love casts out fear,'" I quote at her, but my heart isn't in it. I try not to listen to her and concentrate on what's happening on stage.
It is no escape. Everything in the opera, Monteverdi's "Return of Ulysses," is taking on double meanings. Ulysses has made his way back to Ithaca and his faithful wife Penelope--that's my sister--after a twenty-year absence. He'd angered Neptune a decade back, and in his anger the god of the sea had kept him from his home. So there is much about the way gods toy with human beings that seems terribly applicable to the current situation. Much talk of war, too, and suffering that has gone on too long. Ten years of war. I am trying to not imagine it. The vengeance of an angry god toward men arrogant enough to believe they steer the course of their own lives. I can't believe how trapped I feel, having to listen to something so raw and sad now of all times.
Ka-Re's voice. "The worlds should not draw this near."
"Every story I've written about you, you wanted less communication between the worlds, while Kahtah wanted more. Why?"
"You see the answer for yourself," she says.
I had thought the meeting would be gentle, the boundary like gauze. Now I can only picture massive spheres colliding, propelling shards of the real and unreal in all directions like shattered glass.
The unreal is babbling inside me. Ka-Re's voice and Kahtah's voice can no longer be distinguished. Kahtah pulls at Ka-Re and Ka-Re tugs at Kahtah; words float through my mind to describe it: "she strikes at your head..." They are wrapped in each other and cannot be torn apart. Onstage Ulysses meets a stranger who unmasks and reveals herself as Minerva, the goddess who has protected him all along. As he falls down in worship he tells her what he now understands: "It is a grave sin to fear the world when defended by heaven."
These are the first words that have made sense all evening. One can't know, of course, if one is defended by heaven, but if I am, there's nothing to worry about; if I'm not, there's nothing I can do. There are no bombs or swords or crows or hawks in the rest of the evening. There is only Ulysses firing arrows to defend his home, only Penelope, who had long since given up hope, believing at last the war is truly over and her husband stands before her. Joy breaks into her face like the slowest, grandest sunrise.
---
Halloween night my sister tells me there's a parade in Greenwich Village. We eat dinners of shrimp and shredded beef at a Cuban restaurant before I head out on the train. The subway stations are crowded with police officers ready for the worst, but Minerva is still on my mind and I am fearless. At the parade the drag queens are all in red, white and blue, which is touching in a way I find difficult to describe. I know I'm near Irving Street so I try to find the Gothic Revival building where Irving is perched. But as I head south and the numbers get smaller--Seventeenth, Sixteenth, Fifteenth--there's an acrid smell in the air. If it is what I think it is, and it smells like that this many blocks away, I don't want to be any closer. So I head back underground.
A little boy about nine years old comes to sit next to me to wait for the train. "Happy Halloween," he says. I can't figure out his costume, which is just a black cape with ragged edges. He's there with a friend, who is dressed as some modern superhero, and his friend's mom. The little boy and I become fast friends chitchatting on the bench. When the train comes the mom beckons, but he just points to me. "I wanna sit by her." So we sit together on the subway. He tells everyone who passes us to have a happy Halloween. He demonstrates to me how quickly he can eat a lollipop. I tell him I'm very impressed. He shares some of his candy with me--I'm even more impressed by his altruism until he says he's allergic to chocolate. "I'm a monster," he tells me.
"Are you?"
"I'm really a killer. I'm that guy from 'Scream.' 'Cept I lost my mask."
Our conversation has reached a lull. He chomps on a second lollipop. "What does 'Halloween' mean?"
"It's short for All Hallows Evening," I tell him. "It's the night before All Saints Day, which used to be called All Hallows. Like "all holy." But really it was around long before there was an All Saints Day. Long, long, long ago, this used to be New Year's Eve."
He nods. Time to begin again, I think. Each in her own place, separate and uninfluenced. A veil between, or a shroud, but nothing to be afraid of.
It's my stop. "Happy Halloween," he says again as I get up.
"Happy New Year," I tell him. He clamps his teeth down on his candy and smiles.
My sister arranges for another babysitter so I can go see the opera she's starring in. I'm to meet her friend Cindy at the door of the State Theatre and give her the other ticket. While I wait for her I amuse myself by scanning the crowd. One woman has come for the All Hallows Eve Eve performance wearing a black and orange feather boa. A whole pack of priests arrives, six or seven Roman collars. I idly wonder what the appropriate collective noun would be until it hits me that, of course, I should call it a mass of priests.
Then Cindy appears. She took lessons at the same time my sister did in Chicago; currently she's the soprano understudy at the Met and that's what's brought her to town. Opera singers have complicated social lives but they are bound to run into each other every so often. Cindy is petite, pretty, vivacious, highly outgoing, the sort of person I take to immediately. We make opera-related small talk (I can fake it with the best of them) and I anticipate a pleasant evening.
Before we go in she says, "I need to call my husband. We've been having problems with our internet access and I should check in." She flips open a cell phone and dials. I wait. "Hi...Angela says the first act is an hour and 45 minutes. Should I call back at intermission and walk you through the setup?...No, what?...I haven't heard anything, what have you heard?...Madison Square Garden? Not far enough."
I look at her. "What is it?" I ask.
She looks at me, her eyes wide and serious. She speaks into the phone with a sudden note of authority in her voice. "Okay. In that case, I'll grab them both and get the hell out of here."
"What happened?" I croak. She just clutches my arm, this woman I've never met, and says into the phone, "It's a stone building, would that help? Wouldn't it have to be lead-lined?"
For a horrible, horrible thirty seconds while
I spend hours in the gargoyle store. I tell myself this is the sort of traveller I am; I don't go from tourist attraction to tourist attraction, I just want to learn one thing from one place. But of course there's more to it than that. I'm not sure what, just more.
The first time the shopkeeper says anything to me, it's "If you don't mind, I'm going to get a cup of coffee from across the street." He nods at another fellow in the entranceway. "He'll watch the store." I had just made my mind up to ask him about the golden roses, too. I don't really want to ask the other fellow, so I patiently wander through the place again. This time I notice an egg carton filled with small carved skulls.
Some time later, the shopkeeper returns. His face lights with surprise. "Wow! You waited!"
I inspect the roses with care before I finally risk picking one up. I notice that whoever made them let some of the gold pool in the cups of the petals. "How much is this?" I ask.
"Thirty-five dollars," he answers.
My heart sinks. I can't possibly spend that much. Still, it's a way to draw him into conversation. "Where did you get them?"
"From a leprechaun," he says with what appears to be a deliberate twinkle in his eye. I just look at him. "Really!" he insists, again seeming to play up the cute. I shake my head. Another customer walks in. I put the rose back but stay nearby to listen to him sell. He's very, very good at it. Something like three out of every four people who walk in the door in the course of this long afternoon-to-evening leave with a purchase. I've known enough people in retail sales to understand how remarkable this is.
I have come up with the profound thing I want to say, but I wait until he is finished talking to some potential customers. It takes a long time, but they finally move away from him toward the back, and I step forward. I've decided I've been long enough in his shop that I owe him the truth. "Those paintings," I say, waving a hand at all the half-formed faces. "I don't know what to make of them."
"What do you mean?"
"They're a little--I don't know--" I fumble for a word. "Disquieting? They make me uneasy."
"The artist calls them 'soul paintings.'"
"That might explain it." Trapped souls, I think to myself. "I can't make my mind up about them," I continue aloud. "I can't figure them out."
"That's good, though, isn't it?" He looks like he wants to be helpful. His voice is still quiet but earnest. "Things you can't make an easy decision about are the most interesting."
Not a bad answer. Maybe my gut instinct about both the paintings and this place was off. Maybe there's a far more complicated dance going on between the plaster saints and the skulls. And then finally I think of Kahtah. I realize there isn't going to be an easy answer about her, either.
I'm not sure yet what I've gotten out of being here, but I'm glad I've come. The shopkeeper is a busy man who sells a lot of Irvings while I hang around. I listen to him explain the difference between gargoyles and chimera, chimera being the creatures standing on the roof of Notre Dame and gargoyles the creatures leaning over the edges. He never gives a dull answer to any question. Someone asks him how he has acquired such a range of merchandise.
"It comes to us," he says. "We've never gone after anything with intent."
"But--I mean, what kind of distributor do you work with?"
"Time," he responds. "Time is its own distributor." The questioner gives up. I catch the shopkeeper's eye from across the room and we grin together as though sharing a private joke.
In between customers ("They're lucky skulls," he explains to one man) I chat with him about his stained glass windows rescued from demolished churches and about the book I've come to Boston to promote.
"You're a writer?" he asks.
I nod. "You never know. You may end up in a story." He seems amenable to the idea.
By the time I leave I am running late for the event I came to Boston for. But as I run for the T, the city's subway/bus/trolley, I'm thinking of the story I will write. I imagine this shopkeeper meeting himself on its pages; I imagine talking to him again through it. The shroud or fog covering those faces in the paintings, that's what I didn't like, I decide suddenly. When I write about this, if I can do it, I'll make sure there will be no shroud between what I mean and what I say.
I know my nephew hasn't been following the story--at this point he isn't even conscious--but I don't care. I am telling it to myself rather than to him. We go back indoors. My sister isn't there. Ka-Re is.
"Then what happened?" she asks after I've recovered from the shock of finding a tall, hooded personage where I expected my sister to be.
"What are you doing here?" I demand. "And where's --" As I ask I see the note left on the kitchen counter: "Out getting dinner--back soon." "What are you doing here?" I ask again.
She sweeps her arm around, indicating the high ceilings, the brass lamps, the bulky fireplace. "Doesn't this look like the sort of place where I'd be?"
"You can't expect me to come up with a sensible answer to certain problems if you keep popping into reality like this," I retort. "I'll start questioning my sanity, and I need to be quite sure of my sanity before delving into anything more serious."
"I'm not in reality. You're imagining me again." Was she telling the truth? Kahtah told me she never lied, but Ka-Re made no such claim. "Let the baby sleep and tell me the rest of the story."
I grunt my reluctance but unhook the carrier and lay its cargo down on the bed, Snuggli and all. Because this is a large studio apartment by New York standards, it takes me five whole steps to walk from there to the refrigerator, where I pour myself a glass of the vanilla-enriched rice milk. I hold up another glass in Ka-Re's direction. "Would you like--"
"I'm not here."
"Sorry. Just habit, I guess." My head hurts. I try to shake the muddle out, but it doesn't work.
Ka-Re is perched on the corner of the bed with the light behind her; it is difficult to look at her face as she speaks. "You were telling him that I was like my sister but not like enough to be what she was, and what it took to find my own place in the world long after everyone else had taken theirs."
I smile despite myself. "Today was the first day I noticed it, you know, after telling the story over and over so many years. I never realized how connected it was to how I felt toward my own brothers and sisters." My gaze lands on the dresser, strewn with notes from an Italian opera agent and a collection of exotic earrings. I sigh. "Like when my mom was showing off a family photo--I couldn't have been more than twelve--and listing what everyone did. I couldn't understand why there wasn't a description behind my name."
Ka-Re's voice is soft, musing. "And when it was time for me to find my own place, I was not ugly but plain, and no one noticed me...Is this your feeling too?"
"It is how things are," I mutter. "For anyone. I don't know if it's due to looks or charisma or what, but some people are noticed and some people aren't. That's just the truth. Not being noticed--no, worse, speaking and not being heard; that's what I've--" My breath catches in my throat. I have to start again. "I had this dream the other night that I was trying to tell someone something very important but he would not listen. I tried again and again but he just waved me aside. By the end I was screaming. When I woke up and thought back on it I was a scared of the vehemence involved. I'd been tapping into a violence I didn't realize was inside me." I fall silent for a moment, remembering. "My biggest fear is that I'll be ignored."
"Your biggest fear?" Ka-Re echoes.
"Well, aside from nuclear war," I say lightheartedly.
"So." My visitor draws in a breath and adopts an air of changing the subject. "In the story I have come to a house, and this house I take as my kingdom. It can be reached from any world if one is in a particular sort of danger, and so I take assisting those who are in this danger as my task. I work against the black crow who draws many to despair."
"And once you have your kingdom, you can take your hawk shape again and speak to your Grandmother Sun again," I finish.
"So," she says once more, leaning forward. "Tell me of my sword."
She hasn't changed the subject at all, and we both know it. "You got it from the Fairy Queen."
Ka-Re stands and brushes at her skirt. "Shall we stage this scene the way you used to stage all these stories?"
My mouth drops open.
"I'll be me, you can be the Fairy Queen," she says before noticing my look. "What?" she asks innocently.
I shake my head slow and then fast. "How much more surreal is this going to get? You want to stage a dialogue between you, a person who's not really here, and me, pretending to be someone I'm not?"
She frowns as if this is an objection she doesn't understand. I try a different protest.
"What if my sister walks in?"
"She won't," Ka-Re assures me.
Best just to surrender to the inevitable, I think. "Right, okay. I'm the Fairy Queen." I close my eyes in concentration while I mentally adapt myself to the role. There is one word to describe the Fairy Queen's character, and that word is "amoral." She has no compass for her actions, except perhaps self-interest, and that is no reliable guide because what interests her most is pursuing her whims. How I act, what I say, has to fit through that filter if I am to play her part.
"The scene is the first time the Fairy Queen comes to see me," Ka-Re prompts.
I open my eyes. "So you are Ka-Re, Phoenix-child and Phoenix-twin," I say, honeying the words. "What a delight it is to meet you. And this is the home you have chosen for yourself? What an interesting choice."
Ka-Re lowers her head. "I am honored that you visit it, your majesty."
"Please--call me Titania. Of the many names I've been given it is the one I prefer." If I were very good at acting, my laugh at this point would sound like the ringing of tiny silver bells. Instead, I laugh my own way and move about the apartment as though inspecting Ka-Re's home.
In a little while Ka-Re breaks the silence. "Do you know my sister well, Titania?"
"Only the Phoenix knows the Phoenix, Ka-Re. Except--now you do, I suppose." I look at her and suddenly smile. "Oh, you must be wondering what occasioned this visit. I am sorry; I hadn't meant to be mysterious, but I am very bad at the idle chatter of social occasions. Do forgive me."
"No need to apologize, Titania. Tell me what is on your mind."
"I suppose you might call it a favor," I say carefully. "Is it true that you and your sister may cross at will the border separating us from your old home?"
"It was never my home."
"The Phoenix's home, then."
"You mean the world of Egypt and China and Arabia?"
"You seem reluctant to speak of it."
"The body of the old Phoenix, wrapped in the nest of incense and spices, is always taken by the new Phoenix to an altar at Heliopolis. So as long as there is a Phoenix she must be able to journey to that world, yes, and so, yes, the border is open to my sister and myself. We journeyed there together to bury our mother."
"I remind you of the pain of loss by mentioning it," I note. My tone is of curiosity rather than concern. It is not like the Fairy Queen to show empathy.
"I am wondering why you ask about this, Titania, that is all."
"It used to be that it was easy to cross between my world and that one," I say. "The doors between are fewer now--I know one or two that are left. The favor I wish to ask you is that you help me get back and forth from that world to my own."
I fix my gaze on her. She knows I--or rather the Fairy Queen--would not make a good enemy, and fear clouds her expression for an instant. Then she takes a gulp of air and says,
"I am sorry, but I cannot help you. The doors, as you say, are almost all closed now; they must surely be closed for a reason. I do not plan to go into that world again myself. I think if we were to journey back and forth now, it would prove to be a dangerous interference. I mean no insult to you. I just don't think journeys like that would be right."
I draw myself up to stand a little taller and keep my expression perfectly neutral for a time. Then I allow a slow smile to land on my face. "You may be right, Phoenix-child. It may have been good for you to refuse me. We may never know that for certain, of course." I laugh again, brightly, cheerfully, but I notice Ka-Re cringes at the sound. "I admire your intelligence. It is no small matter to be so young in the world and already know the borders must stay closed, when in my ages and ages of life I never guessed. I will see you again soon, I hope." I turn and take some steps away.
"Well played, Angela," Ka-Re compliments. "We have time for another, I think. Make this one about the sword."
So I walk back again as the Fairy Queen, imagining the little cocktail sword in my hand as I speak. "Look what I have brought, Ka-Re. The fairies crafted it from a single sapphire. Isn't it a marvel?"
"It is certainly beautiful," she answers hesitantly.
"You've no idea. Take it," I coax, stepping in closer to her. "See what happens when it is in your hand." I stand just behind her at her left, so near I catch her scent. It is startling how she seems so real now she could have a smell. I wonder if I had once associated her with a fragrance and had since forgotten. And then I remember. "Myrrh," I say in the Fairy Queen's voice. "One of the resins the Phoenix uses in her final nest. Strange that you would carry with you the scent of your own mortality."
She takes the imagined sword from my hand. In her hand it is the size a sword should be, but still as transparent blue as the northern sky.
"That is a bit of my magic," I say proudly. "Distortion. I can make things become what they were not."
"Can one fight with a sapphire sword?" she asks.
"You certainly can fight with that one. I have placed a further magic on it. That sword is unbeatable."
Ka-Re slants her eyes from the sword to me. "What do you mean?"
"Exactly what I said. If you wield that sword you will win any battle you fight. And it is my gift to you."
"I-I cannot accept such a gift. It is too much."
"It is too late," I reply, my tone just slightly mocking. "You have accepted it. The sword went from my hand to yours when I offered it. By our law, it is an accepted gift. And an accepted gift from the Fairy Queen may not be returned."
"But--it is so dangerous. I can never, ever use it. To fight with it would be wrong."
"My, you're quite the one for deciding right and wrong around me, aren't you?" I grin as I say it. "What is so dangerous about it? Surely it's what every warrior wants."
"But, by definition, what only one warrior can have. Titania, listen--"
"I think, at present, I shall prefer 'your majesty,'" I interrupt.
"Your majesty, please listen. Going into battle is a serious step. It should only be done when one believes her cause is so just she is willing to lay her life down for it. If I know in advance I will win every battle I join, what is to keep me from joining battles where I have no place? What would stop me from imposing my view of the world on anyone I meet?"
"I do not know, Ka-Re. But you will have a chance to find out. Enjoy your gift." I turn and begin to walk away again. Then I stop and remark over my shoulder, as if just remembering it, "The sapphire was mined from Kahtah's land by my fairies, as you might have guessed--an element of despair being necessary in the manufacture of an unbeatable weapon. So you may find the Battle Crow to be of the opinion that the sword is rightfully hers. Of course she is mistaken. You took that sword from my hand as my gift to you. It is yours." I resume walking.
The baby whimpers on the bed and I hear a key in the lock. I turn back to comfort my nephew and Ka-Re is already gone. But there is an echo of her voice inside me--no, it is not like an echo, it is like she has written the words into me: "You need to learn about both Kahtah and the sword. Neither one are going away; both are true. What is your biggest fear?"
---
I take the train to Boston. I have appropriate music in my Discman--as the train picks up speed out of the station, solemn organ notes blend together and crescendo. I'm looking out at blue sky, vibrantly hued New England forests and leaves swirling past the windows in clouds thick as swallow flocks. I am profoundly moved. A strange mood I'd been feeling of dissatisfaction and unease is lifted at once.
This side trip is one of the reasons I agreed to go to New York. I wanted to get to the East Coast because I had a chance to sell some of my Marc Connors books in Boston. Marc Connors--now there is someone with myth wrapped around him. A singer who died long before his time, someone who possessed what I continue to insist was the most beautiful voice of his generation. When he died I was fifteen and that death shook me as few events have. I remember afterward writing maudlin poetry, as teenagers do, only my maudlin poetry was about golden roses. When I was growing up we had a Children's Book of Saints, and I read in it the story of a young girl facing martyrdom in Rome. She was teased by her guards about the paradise she believed she would soon enter, a place where golden apples grew from the trees and golden roses bloomed in the gardens. "Pick the fruit and flowers for me," one guard said. After she died she appeared to him in a vision, and she held out to him a golden apple and a golden rose.
In Boston, with my friend Renee who has come to meet me, the talk turns to witches. It is not because I mention Kahtah or my peculiar quest. It is because Salem is just up the road. "Salem is incredible," she says. "There are lots of witches. It's like they're out of the closet."
---
I have a day to wander around the city. Since I am no longer in New York, the place where I thought I'd meet what I was afraid of, my mind isn't on Kahtah. I cross Copley Square to Trinity Church because Renee said it was beautiful. It is a small Romanesque building with an empty plaza out front. Businessmen and women in suits stride across the square as I trundle along dragging my bag of books. Just in front of the entrance there is a twelve-pointed star set in the concrete, something like a large compass roase. It seems to serve no purpose but decoration, but a circle of white stones has been placed around it--bright white, like quartz, and each the size of a fist. Strange to be confronted by something so pagan-looking in front of an Episcopalian church. The businessmen and women don't seem to notice it, but none step inside the circle.
Later in the day I walk along a row of shops on a street Renee promised was "eclectic." I go in and out of several record stores, making the unhappy discovery that the piles of CDs by bands I don't know no longer excite me as vistas of new possibilities; they just look like piles of CDs which I lack the time and funds and interest to sift through. I see soap bubbles further up the street--they come from a bubble machine in front of a fairy store (they advertise they carry mermaids too). I stop in and buy cards for the fantasyphiles in my circle. A quote on the wall talks about the boundary between worlds and how the boundary lines blur sometimes. Yes, I think. That's true. But there is nothing in the shop that fits what I'm searching for, whatever that might be. I'm not sure what it is; I perceive only the lack of it and leave.
Further up the street, past Mayan Imports and Tibetan Imports, a Welsh flag catches my eye. It hands on a door by a sign advertising "The Gargoyle Shop and le galerie d'ame"--the Gallery of the Soul. I walk in and another odd mood comes over me. The interior is very strange and somehow ominous, and I nearly walk right back out again. But then I see this T.S. Eliot quote on the wall:
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
I am trying to arrive at what I do not know, and there is much in this place which is unfamiliar to me. I walk around it and burn the details in my memory.
Not much light. From hidden speakers tremble slow piano notes, no discernible melody, continuing and continuing and never reaching resolution. Walls covered in paintings of faint color, little dots of eyes and out of focus faces. The surfaces of the paintings cracked like they are ancient, the faces emerging from the surfaces like drowned men seen underwater. Stained glass windows, not art glass in rectangular frames but real stained glass windows, perhaps from fallen churches. Religious statuary piled in corners, facing random directions. Broken pieces of glass hanging on wires round the necks of plaster angels or suspended like a chandelier over the head of a plaster St. Teresa (nearly my height, with a crack down the length of her face forming what could be the path of a tear). A white plaster bishop with blue eyes. A chain mail shirt. None of this merchandise has a price tag. In the back where it gets darker, in a coffin, a mummy demon or perhaps vampire--grey skin, pointy ears, misshapen teeth, talon hands. And gargoyles, big and little, stashed up on shelves or blocking the aisles, and spread over a table massive prints of old photographs of the gargoyles hanging off the roof of Notre Dame.
I cannot, cannot get my bearings in this place. The word "evil" flickers through my head but then I start reading words written in careful script on a poster near the Eliot poem. It begins "It's time to get serious." As I read I experience the strange slow creep of remembrance, of familiarity. I know the words very well but I do not know why. By the end, when credit is given to a character in the Wim Wenders movie "Wings of Desire," I nod and smile. It's one of my favorite movies, and the soliloquy I've just read contains some of my favorite lines. Finding them out of context confused me for a time but now I feel better about this whole store. Anyone who will quote Wim Wenders can't be all bad. Right?
Still--the unbalancing piano music, still--the vacant eyes in the paintings looking out through fog or shrouds, still--the demon mummy vampire. I walk circuit after circuit, weaving between the statues, hunting for clues, anything definitive. I keep my ears open.
"What's this?" a young woman in a linen suit asks the shopkeeper. He is my height, with a gentle face, kind eyes, and a Paul McCartney-esque floppy cuteness. The customer has picked up a palm-sized creature sitting on its haunches. It has a pensive expression.
"That's Irving," the shopkeeper says. He has a quiet voice but an animated way of speaking. His words tumble out almost too quickly to follow. "He's the defender of truth, justice, and the Gothic way. The Gothic way is simply attention to detail. You see, the Gothic revival was all about reacquainting ourselves with what may seem insignificant but is really of utmost importance. God is in the details. In that size"--the little fellow is flanked by cousins twice or thrice his height--"Irving's your personal protection. And he does a good job, too. He's named for Irving Street in New York, where he sits on top of a building near 14th. And you'll notice that after the terrorist attacks, what was south of 14th was hit hard, but everything north of 14th was unaffected."
His linen-suited customer buys herself an Irving and leaves. I take another circuit through the shop, which is small but so crammed with--well, whatever all this is, I hesitate to call it merchandise--that every time I circle round I catch sight of something new. This time what I see makes me stop and makes my mouth open in shock.
On the floor is a pieta, Mary with the dead Jesus sprawled on her lap; it's about one-sixth the size of the pietas I've seen in churches. This is not what shocks me. What shocks me are the nearby flowers. Longstemmed, many-petalled, almost throwing off light with their metallic sheen. Golden roses. Someone dipped living roses in gold. I hesitate to pick one up. I have an old superstition that if I want something very badly and I take hold of it, I will have to get it. So for the moment I content myself with staring at them.
The shopkeeper is talking to another young woman holding an Irving. "He fights for truth, justice, and the Gothic way, and the Gothic way is attention to detail." He recites the rest of his speech while she looks at him with wide eyes.
"Wow. So what's a gargoyle for, anyway?"
They get rainwater off a cathedral, I answer in my head. The water runs out of their mouths, hence "gargoyle" is related to "gargle." To my surprise, the shopkeeper says no such thing. "They're a symbol of chthonic power--"
"I'm sorry, what power?"
"Chthonic. Deep underground stuff that can push its way up into the everyday world. Like volcanoes. Just like what happened with the World Trade Center is a chthonic power." He doesn't elaborate, and she doesn't ask him to.
She buys an Irving and as she puts her wallet away she asks him, "Can you write that down for me, what you said about truth, justice, and some kind of way?"
"The Gothic way."
"Right."
Instead of writing it, he repeats his speech once more. "Say it after I've said it."
"But I can't remember all that!" she complains.
"Whatever you remember from what I said will be better than what I said."
She takes a hesitating try at a couple of phrases, and he beams. "See? You said it a lot better than I did."
She leaves. He looks over at me and smiles. I'm unsure of what I want to say. I have this sudden urge to attempt to be profound, but I don't know where to begin, so I'm tongue-tied.
My friend Jim doesn't know I'm writing this story. But he knows about Ka-Re. Early in our friendship I told him all about her, about her daughters and the different things they guard, about her sword. He has always been intrigued by the story of her home, the Fortress, how it exists in an in-between place. "The way someone can reach it," I told him, "is if he's desperate. Think of yourself as lost, aimlessly wandering, afraid. Maybe you feel paranoid, you see a black crow on the top branch of a nearby tree and you think it's watching you, and then you remember there's been a crow close by every time you've turned around in the last few days. You just start running--and then you see this grassy hill in front of you. You climb it and at the top of that hill is the Fortress, and Ka-Re there to help you."
The idea that it is atop a hill comes again from my earliest ideas about Ka-Re. I pictured the Fortress as resembling my own house, which is on top of a grassy hill. But I think back on that detail now and see it means more than I thought it did. The help doesn't come until the final effort is taken. The hill isn't hard to climb, but if you don't climb it, nothing happens.
I'm on the phone with Jim and we are discussing inconsequential things. But then he says "I was thinking about Ka-Re the other day in one of my bitter moods. I was wondering which of her daughters was the guardian of Prozac."
I do know where Kahtah is. I cannot go there in person without having to explain why I'm visiting a place where I used to work and why I've brought a flashlight.
She's there and she isn't. What's there is a clay statue of a crow I made some years back. I don't know why I made her. I crumpled some newspaper and covered this in foil in a rough bird shape. Then I took clay--just mud from the backyard, really--and covered the foil. I painted the whole thing black with fabric paint and added little red paste gems for eyes. I made wings with feathers from the craft store. Jim made legs from black pipe cleaners. I had her on a shelf in my room for months before I finally decided she looked way too malevolent to keep. It didn't seem like a good idea to throw her away, and I wanted her to have an interesting home. I wanted someone to stumble upon her decades later and be bewildered by the discovery.
So I found a place. I know it well enough that, like Lafayette Park, I can picture it now that the need arises.
Two blocks from me is my old grade school. It is now an art school; I spent a couple of summers as a staffmember there. The building is tan brick and solidly built. I remember I used to stand in line to come back in from recess and look up at a "Fallout Shelter" sign. The terrazzo floor at the entrance has a circle with a "T"; this fits its old name as well as its new one. It helps for the new name that the shape of the letter is suggestive of a tree. Up the stairs then. Past cheery walls festooned with tiny painted handprints, up the metal staircase to the gym. I'm not going to the gym. I go in an alcove toward the kitchen where the fish fries used to be held, turn right and up another staircase with wrought-iron posts. At the top is a balcony overlooking the gym; behind it are doors to storerooms. The first time I went to an assembly I remember looking up to this balcony and those doors and deciding that was university; those were dorm rooms. Now I know they contain what no one can get rid of and what no one can use.
Still travelling in memory, I go in the door furthest from the stairs. On the shelves from the old grade school: boxes of bingo cards and markers, giant Valentine's Day decorations, yards and yards of ancient discolored crepe paper. From the current school: remnants of a Halloween haunted house from several years back, including a donated stuffed goat's head. Back when I used to work here and the kids bugged me to tell them secrets of this creepy old building, I told them there was a dead goat on the top floor, but they didn't believe me.
I can hear her already. My thoughts are turned in her direction and she knows this. "Did you think you would be rid of me if you put me here?" she asks.
I don't answer. I hear a sighing kind of sound coming from the rear of the store room. I move to the back door, and my shadow cast from the bare light bulb comes up to meet me as I open it.
The door opens not on a room, but on the bare space beneath the school's roof. The floor and walls are the wooden exoskeleton of the building. The sigh I am hearing is the wind coming through chinks in seventy-year-old bricks.
The first thing I see is the Land Where Desks Go to Die. Sturdy, boxy shapes are piled one atop another--seats with green metal-framed caves for books underneath and fake wood planks on stout arms above, desk after desk in rows and and aksew, more that can be seen byeond the halo of light from the storeroom. I step in among them, turn right, and start walking on the rafters. Beyond the Land Where Desks Go to Die is the Forest of Hat Racks. The artist who owns this building now received maybe fifty or a hundred hat racks. She had friends paint some to auction as artwork, but most of them ended up here. They are as tall as full grown men and spiked down their length like an unfamiliar variety of cactus.
The light is gone now, but I know what is coming. I have been walking with a wall to my right but the wall is suddenly gone. There is only cool emptiness.
"I know you heard me," she says. "It would be foolish of you to ignore me."
Her voice is even harder to hear than Ka-Re's was. I have to measure every word I think she is saying. Her voice is steady and slow, the voice of one waiting a long, long time for justification.
"I don't know what to say," I answer truthfully.
She chuckles. Any harshness in the sound is barely noticeable. "Why don't you ask me a question, and see if I will answer?"
"But how do I know you'll tell me the truth?" I want to ask, but I don't. This is only one of the problems with our conversation. Out loud I ask "How can I tell if I'm hearing what you would really say, or what I just think you'd say?"
"That is simple enough. If you don't like what you're hearing, that's my voice. Despite what you think, I do not lie. I don't have to. Ask what you want to know."
"I'm trying to understand what motivates you."
"What motivates you? Listen." I feel around, guess it's safe, and sit down on the floor. She waits until I am settled before continuing. "Once there was a young woman who lived all alone in a large house. She had made many ambitious plans for her life before she moved to this house, where for the first time she was in charge of paying bills, fixing every meal, and keeping the place in repair. Daily she worked at a job which ate all her energy--she came home so exhausted the most she could do most nights was to eat some crackers and go to bed. And soon she realized she couldn't even begin to act on any of her grand dreams, so wrapped up she'd become in subsisting, not living. She slid further and further into inaction.
"I was helping the process along. It is one of the things I can do. Again, I do it by telling the truth. I would have no effect if what I said was a lie. But I said things like 'The lightbulbs burn out soon after your replace them' and 'the plumbing is leaking again' and 'the house's foundation is cracked and you have no money set aside to fix it.' She'd look around and it would all be true. I wore her down so far she stopped trying to repair anything. Then I wore her down so far, she would sit in the middle of her living room floor with a pile of bricks that had fallen off her porch and she'd throw these bricks through her own windows, just to accomplish something." I hear a smile in her voice. "When you were a little girl didn't you see apartments with broken windows? Didn't you imagine something like that had happened to all of them? You weren't far wrong, you know. Destruction's a mighty urge."
"That house you just described--that's where Ka-Re now lives," I observed.
"She has no right to it. I did all that work and then watched it get taken over by another."
"And that's why--"
She interrupts quickly. "Do you think you'll learn the answer to a 'why' by sitting here talking to me? It's taking everything you've got just to imagine yourself up here, and how hard is that? This place is as black as the inside of your eyelids and the wind's no louder than a breath. Have you ever worked on anything you are more unsure about?"
"I'm not the girl who hurled bricks through her windows, Kahtah. This isn't about my self-confidence, or whether I'll succeed at what I'm attempting. It's just about whether I'm attempting it."
"You're not attempting anything. You're holding conversations in your head in a mental image of your old grade school. The campaign isn't begun and you're already in retreat."
"What should I do, then? Where should I go?"
Out in the real world the phone rings, breaking my concentration. The black of the school attic becomes the chaotic color of my bedroom. I pick my way through to the phone and accept an invitation from my sister to go with her to New York City.
---
I am scared to go to New York City. I am scared the night before the trip and sleep fitfully with the beginnings of migraine.
I see the word "anthrax" in the morning paper and my stomach clenches like a fist. Arriving two hours early at the airport I duck into its chapel, thinking of knights and their all-night prayer vigils before battle. I put my bag on the seat next to me--and hear it ticking. I hadn't packed a clock. Alarmed, I unzip it to discover my CD player is vibrating because the batteries had come a little loose. It had never done such a thing before. Why now? I take out the batteries and the ticking stops.
There is familiar comfort in boarding the plane shrouded over in anxious mindfulness. I am hyper-aware during the crawl from the gate to the runway. My absolute presence in the moment the tires leave the ground would put a Zen monk to shame. If it weren't for the many strange rattling noises (have planes always made this much noise?) and the steep banking (why does the pilot have to make such a sudden turn now? Can't he wait until we're higher up? It's not like we're about to miss the exit to New York), I would glory in being disconnected from earth. Five minutes later the pilot's voice: "Uh, folks, we just encountered a flock of geese up here and one hit the windshield. Not a problem, but we're turning back to check the engines, make sure those are okay..." We land in St. Louis and fifteen minutes later take off again. This time I recognize some of the noises and make peace with the way the plane shakes on liftoff. Surely, I think, it doesn't do me the least bit of good to tune in to every wobble. If they are normal, I've nothing to worry about. If they aren't, I'm not going to be able to take a screwdriver to the problem and save the day. It is sudden comfort to relinquish the illusion of control over my own destiny.
In a few short hours I am in New York, trundling down streets in the airport shuttle. The woman next to me takes one look at the way I am dressed and pegs me as someone headed for Greenwich Village. It is no small satisfaction to answer, when she asks what I'm doing in New York, "I'm visiting my sister who's starring in an opera in Lincoln Center." She's a native and provides running commentary on the sights we pass. She tries to tell us where the World Trade Center used to be, but I have no mental image of the skyline to contrast with what is before me. I cannot picture absence. She gets wide-eyed when we enter a tunnel. "We're either going into a tunnel or onto a bridge," the driver says. "What difference does it make? Could you really survive either of them blowing up?"
I'm dropped off at an apartment building on Central Park West and greet my sister and newest nephew. The day passes in a blur of crying baby and orientation to cramped quarters. Late in the day I check my email. There's a message from a friend to whom I'd mentioned I own some swords. He says he finally realizes why I've got them--because I bellydance, and sometimes a bellydancer will balance a sword on her head. But he's wrong. My interest in Pointy Weapons long pre-dates my interest in jiggling my hips about. As night comes and my sister and my nephew sleep, I lay in the sofa bed, the blanket wrapped snug around my shoulders, and try to hear Kahtah's voice. "Destruction is beautiful and thrilling," I think she says. "You love swords because they are gorgeous. There is nothing like light gleaming off the well-honed edge. But what makes them beautiful renders them able to kill. You cannot separate form and function. If you like them sharp, which you do, then you like them deadly.
"You have to accept that a part of you is in love with destruction. In childhood you built towers of blocks and delighted in knocking them down. Stories of Pompeii and Herculaneum swallowed whole by lava fascinated you. You gathered with neighbors to watch in openmouthed awe as that old wooden house went up in flames, a torch against the night sky.
"That's what you're afraid of, isn't it? You're afraid to admit that when those planes rammed those towers and they burned like smokestacks and they shuddered to ground amid plumes of almost volcanic ash, you were impressed with the sight. You were sickened at yourself for feeling the thrill of it, but you knew you weren't alone--so many people left the tower then turned to watch the fire. That's why they all had to run when the building fell. They wanted to watch the danger until the danger almost buried them."
"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.
Happy birthday to my mom.
She's an amazing person. You should see some of the quilts she's made, and the stacks of jellies and home-canned fruits she creates in her regular dervishes of activity. She seems to always be on the winning team at innumerable Trivia Nights, which means her apartment is overflowing with Pasta House gift certificates and other such prizes when really she was only after the braggin' rights.
And that's just, you know, Current Model Mom. To think this same woman grew up during the Depression, went to work to help support her family, spent a couple of years in the convent with the dream of becoming a teaching sister, was thwarted in that attempt, got out, married a computer guy back when there were no computers, had six kids, has taken rather a lot of trips overseas--it kinda helps put it into perspective that today she'll happily engage in conversation about Thomas Aquinas and then offer her opinion on some Radiohead video I'm watching or prove that she knows all the names of the members of U2.
As I said, amazing.
I once read an article claiming Yeats was the U2 of his time. Without having it in front of me, I can't provide an exact quote, but the sense was "His popularity makes him annoyingly inescapable, but he merits the hype because he really is brilliant."
So U2 and Yeats both have an overwhelming market share, but that's not all. It would almost be easier to list disconnections between them than connections. They own acres of common ground.
Read the rest here.
Later Ellen walked west, back toward her car, on another broad avenue. She kicked a wrinkly green cypress seed as she went. She was thinking of the fairy tale where a princess plays with a gold ball. The ball lands in a well and a frog rescues it for her. The frog, of course, becomes a prince by the end.
Down the path past a brightly painted wooden bridge she saw a woman on a bench. How many times does the girl in a story meet an old woman in the forest? Ellen kicked her makeshift soccer ball but it veered off course into the grass. The rules said she had to kick it back onto the path. Her aim steadily worsened. She had to chase the ball from one side to the other. She kicked it toward the bridge; it veered foul to the left. Before she reached it she heard a noise; load squirrels were quarrel-chuckling down a tree. They heard her approach and froze: one on the ground, one at the base of the trunk. They both acted like they were caught at something, as though theyíd been engaged in behavior a non-squirrel shouldnít be privy to. By the time theyíd wandered off, fake-nonchalant, Ellen had completely forgotten where the ball had landed. She gave up, crossed the bridge, approached the bench.
Passing by the woman without an acknowledgment of some kind would have been rude. She had to at least look in her direction; if the woman ignored her or returned a cold stare, she would feel no further obligation. Ellen shifted her gaze from the road to the woman, who, she discovered, was already looking at her. Perhaps she had been for some time.
The woman was wearing a white jogging suit. Hair curlers covered her headóbright blue, hot pink, green, yellow, red. Ellen returned her attention to the road after giving the woman a nod of greeting.
ìGood morning.î
Apparently a nod wasnít going to be enough. Ellen looked back. ìGood morning.î She continued walking.
îExcuse me.î Ellen stopped. ìI donít mean to bother you, I hope you donít mind, but I havenít slept all night, Iím tired, Iím wore out, Iím not drunk, people think I might be drunk but Iím not, and Iím not on drugs eitheróIím just looking for someone to talk to, surely you can understand, and I really donít mean to bother you, donít need to tell you all my business, but I was trying to get to Kansas City, thatís where my baby is, but now Iíve got a house on Shenandoah, donít need to be kicked out, oh and by the way Iím Anita.î She rose from the bench and shook Ellenís hand.
ìNice to meet you,î Ellen said without offering her name.
Anita sat back down. She had a cigarette in her hand and a plastic tumbler on the bench filled with water or something else. Also on the bench were the cigarette pack and a pile of quarters.
ìIím sorry. Iím sorry.î Anita covered her face with her hands. Ellen made encouraging noises or nodded at any of the many repetitions of ìYou understand? You get what Iím saying?î No alarm bells were going off, no appeals for money were being made, Anita was just rambling in the way anyone might ramble after a night without sleep.
ìAnd I do have a drink sometimes or a bud, that donít solve no problems, that just...mellows you out. But I donít want to go to jail.î She shook her head. Ellen was trying to figure out which of the womanís eyes was actually fixed on hers. She chose the left and ignored the eye that didnít seem to be involved in this conversation. ìDonít like jail. Donít like noplace too tight. I wanna move around. And I donít wanna have to serve nobody either. Only ones on earth I answer to are my momma and daddy. You believe in God?î
Ellen replied in the affirmative.
ìI do too. And heís a jealous God. You get what Iím saying? Donít wanna go around saying ëYessirí or ënossirí to no one else. Was telling my baby and now Iíll tell you, if you wish for it youíll get it, so watch out! Wanna go back to church. Used to sing in the choir, you believe that? Itís been a while.î
ìYou sing?î
ìWhat? Yeah, I sing. Sang with my family, used to go around singing gospel, we went all over. Just us sometimes, no music.î
ìA cappella?î
ìWhat?î
ìWill you sing for me?î
ìRight now?î
ìYeah. Sing me a song.î
ìYou donít really want me to sing...î
Ellen kept up the coaxing. The womanís shy smile told her it wouldnít take much.
ìWhat should I sing? Just any song?î
ìSure. What you used to sing. Gospel.î
ìCome here and sit. You make me nervous, standing there.î
Ellen sat on the bench and lowered her eyes, careful lest her attentiveness prove a distraction. Anita kept almost-starting and laughing.
ìI sing baritone, so this isnít gonna sound like nothing. There were all these parts, this is just what I sang:
Itís so deep
Itís so deep
Itís so deep, Lord and itís so wide
If you wanna see your mother gotta cross over the river
But itís so deep, Lord itís so deep.
Wanna hear it again?î
Ellen sang along this time. Anita guided her through another verse and showed patience toward the novice who kept trying to force the melody to meet her expectations. There voices were in perfect blend when Ellen found the right notes. The sharing of the song made each of them louder; they were confident with it now. The baritone part didnít sound so bad on its ownólonely, maybe, but only because the whole world wasnít singing too. Ellen kept remembering another wise womanís advice: ìWade in the water, itís gonna be troubled water.î
They sang it twice through, tapping time on the bench, while other walkers strolled past. And when they were done Anita laughed and Ellen laughed and they clasped hands like theyíd won a victory.
It was time for one of them to go. They said their goodbyes with a hug and promises of remembrance. Ellen sang her way to the car. Every person she met the rest of the day was smiling.
Ellenís second choice was Tower Grove Park. She had wanted to walk elsewhere, but the elsewhere she had in mind was charging an admittance fee. So she came to the park, found a place for her car near the central fountain and began her march. It had rained recently. The sky was overcast, the ground was damp. Her shoes sank at every step. Mosquitoes, she thought. I should have remembered there would be mosquitoes. It was still early in the morningóthough not as early as she would have preferredóthat was her fault for not dawdling, not the earthís fault for turning. The wet grass, the muck of it, made the journey a trudge. She reached a path and resolved to stay with it.
Ellen stopped briefly at the fountain, the pool of shallow water nearest the path, looking in at rocks and candy wrappers and a glass bottle standing upright. The bottleís neck stood above the water like the arm of the Lady of the Lake. She wondered if a message might be inside. But the trophy was too far to reach, and anyway shallow pools are breeding grounds for mosquitoes. She walked on.
She was headed east. The sun flickered occasionally behind clouds, behind the trees in full green summer leaf. The path was a wide avenue of streaked asphalt. Regularly spaced in that Victorian sense of order were wrought-iron benches, painted drinking fountains, stone bridges over drainage ditches. Ellen was trying to think of nothing in particular. On some visits she could contemplate her past history with the park or imbibe its atmosphere or release herself from a bad mood by constant motion. The plan today was simple recreation, being awake, aware, taking no distraction from present circumstance.
A car slowed down on the parallel road. Quick anxiety flashed through her but then she remembered the speed bumps. The wheels complained over the obstacle and then the car sped off.
Ellen caught a scent and with it a mood. Both the scent and the mood she found difficult to name. They had to do with a mystery about this park, what it was really beneath its seasonal faces. Sheíd come here for yearsóto bike, to picnic, to writeóhad been drawn to this orderly forest again and again, had perhaps always sensed its strange energy but had rarely attempted to name it. She struggled with the question now. She knew she had to try to pin some fragment of it down in her mind if she ever hoped to describe it to another. As she walked down the corridor with its overhang of Osage orange and maple and sweetgum, she fixed the sight of the pathís absolute, unswerving forward sweep in her memory. What word could she give this? Gothic, maybe, and autumnal, even if it was still high summer. The wild part that did not fit a rational view of the world, even if her path had been laid with fanatically geometric precision.
Something new hereóa small pond to the left with cattails and other bog plants, brown, green, high-stalked, chaotic. Beyond this another bridge, another drainage ditch. No water flowed here though, just rich textured soil at the bottom of a cut running across what had been flat landscape.
Ellen veered from the path. Sometimes, coming to this park, she followed rules. They were older or wilder or part of some private conception of a quest. They were like the rules you meet in fairy talesóyou have to go into the woods, ask directions from those you meet, be kind to the old woman who asks you for something. In turn she may give you a gift. Going into the woods seems to be an important step. Once there, you have to keep your eyes open for anything out of the ordinary. You also have to be careful when you stray off the path.
Ellen examined the banks and the course where the stream had once run. Something copper caught her eye. It was the size and shape of a scouring pad. Fairy tales didnít provide a guide for possibilities like these. Ellen in similar situations had made up her own rules. Yes, they were arbitrary, but once she decided on them she followed them. She decided the rule here was that she could not step into the place where the stream had been. (This was a convenient rule because it was likely muddy.) She looked for a stick she could use to prod the copper thingóit seemed to have some kind of tag that she couldnít see at this angle. Perhaps if the copper thing was interesting enough, she could fish it out with the stick and get some treasure out of this quest. She found a stick. Poked with it. The tag said ìCopper scouring pad.î Ellen wrinkled her brow, puzzled by the padís presence but not fascinated enough to rescue it from the ditch.
The rules said she should follow the course of the stream to the north. She had to keep jumping from one bank to the other to do this because bushes and trees kept blocking her way. It was against the rules to walk around these obstacles on the far side. Ellen traveled nearly all the way to another park path and road before she found something else sufficiently out of the ordinary. It was a tree with jade green, broadleafed ivy covering the trunk completely to the height of a man. She moved away from the bank for a closer lookóthis was permissibleóand discovered the tree was a cypress. In fact she now stood in a grove of cypresses. Another strange mood flickered just beyond her grasp. Tall, solemn trees, each removed from the othersóa grove of solitary forms. Green light, the color of spring growth, fell through the tracery of lace-soft needles. She stared, turned, blinked, listened. On another path a young man was walking a large dog. She wondered if she should try to tell him about the cypress. Was he part of this journey too? The chances were slim, she decided. Besides, she still lacked the words.
Robins were all aroundóan elderly one on the ground a few paces away, others flying from tree to tree. One piped a note and another quickly echoed it. She got out a piece of paper and wrote:
ìThe things robins say begin with one bird, travel to another, and on from bird to bird until a whole thought is expressed. No one robin owns the whole message. Sometimes a contradiction comes right in the middle, but that is all right. Rarely does a dissenting voice lead to argument.î
She could set a story here, maybe. Ellen headed back to the path. It was no longer necessary to follow the stream. Sheíd gotten what sheíd come for.