Magic M

“Do you believe in magic?” she asked, flaunting the wild smile that had bewitched Sean since he met her, earlier that evening. She held out a closed hand toward him, palm up. On her wrist, peeking out from her coat sleeve, Sean saw part of a crucifix tattoo. He didn’t know what she was holding, but he knew that, in her hand and in her eyes, she held the answers to all the questions he didn’t want to ask. 

Thirteen years later, almost to the day, as the cancer in his bones consumed him, Sean McKinney was to remember that evening he met the girl in black. At that time, the city streets of Oakland teemed with masked dog walkers and half-naked homeless folk, and in the air wafted the ambivalence of a drawn-out pandemic. In these odd and uncertain times, Sean, who was strategically shy, and respectfully reserved, found himself as more of a recluse than ever. When his two roommates, who were also his only two friends within five hundred miles, simultaneously left town for a couple weeks, he was suddenly struck with the listless, empty feeling that he was wasting his life. With one friend exploring Peru for fun, and the other traversing America for work, Sean couldn’t help but feel lesser, and lonely.

Outside his bedroom window, maybe two dozen crows flew by in a squall of wings and claws and deafening caws. Under threat of falling into a vortex of solitary sadness, Sean had to make a choice. He could stick to the status quo and spend the evening smoking weed and watching TV until he melted into the couch, or…he could go out. Out somewhere lively, somewhere fresh and fun and full of people. The idea equally frightened and exhilarated him, and that’s how he knew it was the right choice.

In no time, Sean found himself ambling around Lake Merritt, taking in the sights of geese and ducks and taco trucks and elote men selling joy on a stick. The lake was near downtown, and was a gathering place both for the young and for the young at heart. In the twilight of his twenties now, Sean fell somewhere in between. Amidst the lively groups of friends and couples, he felt a twinge of solitude. But the natural beauty and human energy from that lake kept him from dwelling on such things.

Both before and after that foray into the unknown, Sean did not know the name of the girl in black. Nor did he ever know exactly how he met her. Maybe he bumped into her by the shaved ice cart near the water. Maybe she appeared as he was smoking spliffs outside the Port Bar. Even thirteen years later, he never remembered. But he always remembered how it felt. Being with her was more than just exciting. Her presence electrified him in a way that was thrilling, terrifying, and a little bit awe-inspiring. The way a moth is drawn to a lightbulb, he felt himself compelled towards the mysterious and striking nature of the girl in black. 

It wasn’t mere beauty that enchanted him, though her obsidian hair and big, dark eyes were lovely. She looked rather plain, aside from the candy skull mask, and the long black leather coat which covered blacker garb. She smelled of smoke and sage and had an uncanny way about her. While by the lake, a purple butterfly landed quaintly on her arm and she looked down at it, unsurprised. Sean was enraptured by that sight and he asked what her name was. “Mariposa,” she mumbled. “It’s a beautiful name,” he said, but she shook her head and pointed at the butterfly, laughing at his expense.

It was also the way she spoke that charmed him. She didn’t speak so much as deliver lines of cryptic poetry. When he asked what to call her, she said, “Don’t call me. I’ll call you.” When he asked her where she lived, she said “I live in secret, between the shadow and the soul.” When he asked her where she worked, she said, “I go wherever there’s work, and I work wherever I go.” When he followed up with, “Are you working now?” she stared at him a moment, almost scowling. Then she broke into a wild laughter. Her laugh was jubilant, but so remarkably unrestrained that it scared him at first, but after a moment he laughed with her. After that, she moved about him more casually, as if he’d passed some kind of test. 

So bewitched was Sean McKinney with this mysterious girl, that when she asked him “Do you believe in magic?” and opened her hand to reveal a healthy smattering of desiccated mushrooms, without hesitating, he said, “I think I’m about to,” and bit into one. Her dark eyes sparkled as she fed him several more. When she took her share of the shrooms, she pulled down her skull mask for the first time. Sean noticed that the dark, sanguine lipstick she wore looked like dried blood, and it complimented her black-coffee eyes.

Before long, everything started looking very shiny, and Sean came down with a bad case of the giggles. The girl in black seemed more in control of herself, but she laughed with him all the same. They caroused their way around the entire lake one time, though Sean would later swear that they circled it at least five times. As they walked by the water and tripped through the trees, it felt to him that entire days or weeks were passing by, every moment an epoch of rippling sidewalks and kaleidoscopic green leaves that whispered to one another. The girl in black pulled him this way and that. To the music of their own laughter, they galloped through the grass and the geese, bouncing smiles off each other.

With her leading the way, they meandered over to Jack London square in time for the sunset. It was getting cold outside, but as they sat on the big steps that descended into the estuary, Sean felt quite warm. A thousand tiny rainbows skipped between undulating waves. As he watched the tide move in and out, he swayed gently back and forth, pushed by the invisible currents.

The girl noticed him, and said, “You look a little wobbly. Are you okay?”

He said, “I ebb and I flow,” and gave her a smile.

She leaned close against him, and they mingled fingers in the dusk, losing track of whose were whose. In the waning sun, Sean stared into the girl’s eyes, trying to tell where her gaping pupils ended and her coffee-colored corneas began. As he stared, those dark eyes seemed to spin like shiny black whirlpools, and to widen, revealing more of the swimming depths within, until they seemed so wide, and he leaned in so close that, for a moment, he felt a jolt of vertigo up his spine as he nearly fell in.

As he stared deeper and deeper into her, Sean suddenly noticed a shimmer of anxiety from the girl, who, up until now, had been all wry smiles and clever comments. There was something about the closeness, he thought, that left her vulnerable to his delving eyes. Just as he noticed this breach in her façade, this second mask being cast off, the girl moaned soundlessly, with her eyes, as if in silent anguish. Before Sean could rummage through his muddled mind for something soothing to say, she grabbed his face and kissed him. When he told the story later, he would say that during the course of that kiss, the sun conceded the sky to the full moon, the lamp posts burned out, and all the people cleared from the square, as the two strangers locked lips outside of time, only reemerging when the king tide crept up to soak their shoes. When Sean returned to reality, he looked up at the sky and there wasn’t a single star to give company to the solitary moon.

After that, they kissed their way blindly to Sean’s apartment, which wasn’t terribly far. They groped their way through the kitchen and coupled on the couch before making love all the way up the stairs and into his bed. As they strew each other’s clothes across the dark apartment, Sean noticed that the girl who was no longer in black had tattoos all over her. In the darkness the only ones he could make out were the crucifix on her left wrist, a circle of symbols on her shoulder, and an ornate letter M beneath her collarbone. 

In the bed, they interwove their bodies until they were so closely knit, that Sean couldn’t tell where his flesh ended and hers began. When he tangled his hands in her hair, he felt the tug on his own scalp. When she sunk her fingernails into his back, he felt the pressure on his fingertips. The act of touching and the act of feeling were no longer divided. Through her, he could feel himself feeling her feeling him, and so on and so on. That virtuous cycle of sensation and pleasure overwhelmed him, and he lost himself amidst the incredible deluge of neurochemicals coursing through his brain.

The last moment of that night that he would remember was the girl lying beside him, one leg tossed across both of his, and her fingers tracing the same pattern on his chest over and over again. Quietly, she said, “I am, I am, I am…”

The next morning, as a crow barked at the clouds, he woke with no memory of falling asleep. Alone in the bed, yesterday’s memories started to resurface. He looked for the girl, then he looked for any trace of her. He found none. Nothing of hers was left behind, not a sock nor an earring, nor a dent in the couch cushions. His clothes, which had been scattered across two stories, were in a pile near his bed. Even the front door was dead-bolted shut. There was nothing unusual at all, except for the fading scent of smoke and sage.

*****

Thirteen years later, almost to the day, Sean sat slumped in his bed in the ICU. He was lost in thought while he waited for his friend and former roommate, Tom-Tom, to return. Barely into middle age, he realized now that he’d never made time for a mid-life crisis, or any crisis that was so decadent as to be self-imposed. He had a notion that he should be upset. He could see it in the eyes of friends who visited him, brimming with pity. Honestly, Sean was not a vain man, so when the cancer robbed him of youth and physical beauty, he didn’t really notice. When it took away his strength, he just took it easy, trading his daily runs for walks and then for stretches on the bed. When it drained him of all the desires of the flesh, be they food or drugs or love, he accepted his solitude nobly, and filled his time meditating and writing down all of the thoughts and stories and poems that were hidden away in his head. But lately, as western medicine failed him the imminence of his fate settled in his bones, and his weakness grew ever stronger, and he felt the cold damp of despair slowly dragging him under. He closed his eyes and sighed deeply. Outside the hospital window, a solitary raven called out, long and loud, with no response.

Before his negative thought train could go any further, Tom-Tom walked in, carrying a black plastic bag.

“Finally,” Sean said. “Was it hard to find?” 

“Sort of, but you were right about where to go.”

“Did you get a quarter ounce?”

“I think so. That’s what I was told anyway. I also got you this chocolate bar, cuz this stuff looks pretty fuckin’ nasty.” He handed Sean the chocolate bar. It said Firecracker 3500mg Psilocybin. 

“I have cancer and you bring me refined carbs? Do you want me to die?”

“That’s sort of like a drowning man saying he’s allergic to the life jacket.”

They both started laughing. They’d never said it, but they knew that humor was the only tool to grapple with such deep sadness. From inside the black bag, Sean opened a small ziploc bag that said Penis Envy in sharpie. He inhaled deeply from it, and then crudely grasped a fistful of fungi and stuffed them into his mouth. His friend watched in mild disgust as his jaw strained and clicked to masticate through the dense thicket of mummified mushrooms. Sean offered the bag, with at least a third of the shrooms left, to Tom-Tom.

“No thanks,” he said. “I can smell them from here. I don’t know how you can do that.”

“For the last two months, everything’s tasted like wet paper. At least these are a little tangy.” He swallowed and smiled, his teeth crawling with strips of brown and beige debris. 

Over the next hour, Sean’s mind metastasized into a flurry of bright pink feelings and laughter that smelled like cinnamon. Tom-Tom partook of the chocolate, then disappeared to find something to drink. In his room, Sean’s laughter was wild, but the nurses chalked it up to the TV show he was watching, which, to him, was an utterly confounding cacophony of colored lights. The light of the television and the light coming through the window became confused in his elevated mind, and he wasn’t sure which one suddenly had a large, purple butterfly perched on the other side of the glass. He had no idea if the butterfly was real or televised or telepathized by his own mind, but it was lovely. When he tried to get up to look closer, he was snared by the tubes and wires on his arm and face. 

“Need a hand?” 

The voice from the door was unexpected, but not unfamiliar. The girl in black stood in the doorway. To Sean’s overly dilated eyes, the pale radiance of her face seemed washed over in beige and magenta waves. Thirteen years had passed but she didn’t look a day older, and she wore very nearly the same clothes. He felt many things in that long moment: surprise at the impossible, relief at the inevitable, and exhilaration at the sight of her. Mostly, he wondered how he would react if he weren’t peaking on magic mushrooms. 

“You’re here,” he managed, releasing an involuntary giggle.

“Not as much as you are.” 

From within her black leather coat, she drew a deck of loteria cards and two folded boards. She sat on the bed, facing him, and laid one board out on his lap. She squeezed his hand and kissed him on the forehead.

“How about a game of chance?”

“Sure. I’m overdue for some good luck.” He started to laugh again. She feigned a smile, and for a moment, Sean once again saw through her invisible mask, and glimpsed that her eyes were filled with sadness. The next instant, her façade was intact again, and she giggled along with him. 

“What are the stakes?” she asked, giving him a playfully serious look.

Sean looked at her for a lingering moment, then moved his eyes around the room, thoughtfully. 

“How about, if I win, I get to live another five decades.”

“And if you lose?”

“Then I get to live another five minutes.”

“So be it.”

She showed him how to play the game, using mushroom caps as markers for the squares. She dealt the cards while he gazed at the dancing figures on his tabla. The mermaid mingled with the drunkard and the little devil climbed the ladder while Death reached for the skull and the rose. The two old friends talked cheerfully while they played. 

“Did you miss me?” he asked.

“Only Just.”

“Did you come to say goodbye?”

“I came by to say hello.”

She put down La Estrella, but instead of a star on the card, there was only empty black space. Staring at it, Sean said, “You know, there were no stars in the sky that night.” 

She shuffled the cards and said nothing.

“You know, nobody believes me when I tell them the story of that night,” he said, chuckling.

“I believe you.”

She put down La Muerte. 

“iBuena!”

“Does that mean you won?”

She nodded.

“I guess that’s it, then.”

She shrugged. He handed her the tabla, and she restacked the deck.

“How did you win so fast?” he asked, unsure how much time had actually passed.

“I cheated,” she said, looking him straight in the eyes.

“It’s bad luck to trick a dying man,” he said, grinning.

“But you were only dying after I tricked you.”

“Fair enough.”

“It’s not fair at all,” she said quietly. Her chaotic energy had dissipated, and her big, gleaming black-coffee eyes threatened to spill over. “Aren’t you angry?”

“Angry?”

“That your life is being taken from you.”

“Taken?” he said, looking amused. “How can my life be taken, when I’ve already lived it?”

She looked like she might cry. 

“You know, that day I met you felt like the longest day of my life.”

“That day by the lake went too fast.”

Sean reached for her hand and squeezed it, and was squeezed. He remembered something had been troubling him, but he couldn’t remember what. It was becoming hard to distinguish his thoughts from reality, but was there really a difference? 

“Are you here with me?” he asked, as the room slowly swirled around him. He felt tired, but not sleepy. Just as he closed his eyes, he thought he glimpsed the purple butterfly flit by him, and his mind began.

She laid down next to him, and moved in close. Placing a hand gently on his chest, she tapped her fingers to the beat of his heart. Rhythmically, she said, “I am, I am, I am, I am, I am, I— ”