Page 29 of Our Crooked Hearts
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The city
Back then
What Marion did on the beach was the first real thing she’d ever done. A flare of wicked intent, shaped by words she hadn’t known she possessed.
“It’s you,” she said. “It’sus.The three of us together, that’s why it worked.”
Alone, she told us, she’d almost done lots of things. With the three of us combined, all thosealmosts could become ways of remaking the world.
But first we had to wake ourselves up.
You couldn’t look for things in the occultist’s book, couldn’t read it cover to cover. If you tried, it would show you blank pages, or black ones. Lines of tangled characters, rhymes that scratched at your ears. Densely inked images, sometimes, that left purple aftereffects on your vision. The way it worked, she told us, was like a tarot deck, delivering the pages you needed to see. And since the beach it kept showing her a single spell, opaquely titled and built for three practitioners.To turn your hand toward working.
It began with a purification ritual. For three days we stayed inside, playing sick so we could avoid mirrors, direct sunlight, and human touch. We drank herbs steeped in spring water, briny with rock salt, and performed ablutions once an hour between sundown and sunup. By the end of it I felt so fragile I wondered if that was part of the spell. You could’ve told me anything right then, and I’d have believed you. Including that I could do magic.
At sundown on the fourth day we gathered the spell’s ingredients—some at the store, the rest harvested from Loyola Park—and went to my empty apartment, our fingers resinous with growing things.
Marion was edgy, withdrawn, her unwashed hair skimmed back into a ponytail. She wouldn’t let either of us touch the book. She kept checking our work, again and again, until there was nothing left to prepare.
I can still close my eyes and summon up the shy, hallucinatory feeling of sitting down with Fee and Marion to perform that first spell. Shallow breaths syncing, hearts up high, nobody sure where to look. Marion was tight as a tuning peg, Fee rippling with nervous laughter. We moved haltingly through the steps, and I was sure it wouldn’t work.
Until Marion completed the final incantation and the air clarified like butter in a pan. Inside that flue of vivid air we fell back, hands entangled, heads thumping hard to the floorboards.
I didn’t feel it. I felt nothing, because my consciousness was rising up, up, and away.
I saw my own body and the bodies of my friends laid out likestarfish. I saw the roof of my building and the flat scatter of our street and still I rose higher, until the whole city sprawled beneath me like a spider’s web, like a dragnet of white gold, black water lapping at its eastern rim and the suburbs biting down its ribs to the west and the downtown a hard metal knot so dazzling you could weep.
From up here I could see we were small, we were specks, we were cosmic dust off a god’s left shoulder, and the discovery filled me with an electric joy. The air was thin and the stars sang their elliptical star song and didn’t care that I heard it. I was less to them than the drifting exhalation of a seed head.
At the apex of my flight—Venus burning at my left hand, Mercury to my right—I felt the very beginnings of fear. It was heavy and it drew me down again, whistling through the black and the silver, through layers of untouched sky, then the manmade haze of pollution and light, the dizzying Escher entanglements of radio waves, until I hung over my body again.
I felt such tenderness for its flawed skin and tangled hair, its angry geometry. But I wasn’t ready to be human again, to breathe and sweat and ache and thirst. So I left it there on the boards.
I coasted through the city on the backs of breezes: a gust hissed out of a bus’s hydraulic lift. The sigh of a woman fixing her bangs in the dirty glass of a convenience store fridge. An old man’s cracked cough, expelled through the gap below a newspaper-covered window.
The city opened its doors to me, tapped out its secrets like cigarettes. It was a street-corner flock of lean and hungrymen, work shirts and hard hands. Girls with their elbows set on chrome countertops, eating sugar packets grain by grain. A sticky-buttoned jukebox at the back of a shotgun bar, full of songs about an America that never existed. Powdery paperbacks sold from blankets spread across the sidewalk and mildew-scented Legion halls clicking with the sounds of a bingo cage. Hot wet rooms full of dancers with helpless faces and music amplified until it was fuzzy as peaches, sharp as grapefruit spoons.
Craving silence, I whistled to the water’s edge. I sped like a skater over its rippling top, hissing around the heads of night sailors and diving down to witness a conquest of zebra mussels, their slow invading sway.
Back to dry land, where I slid between the mouths of a couple on a bench, gaunt and pierced but folded into each other with the perfect courtliness of a Victorian cameo. The bench was at the edge of a graveyard, overgrown. If my soul had hands I’d have reached them out to skim the waving tops of butterfly weed and bellflower, blazing star and mountain mint and the dainty fireworks of golden alexanders.
Rising up from among the sounds of the city—bad brakes and sharp laughter, the furious yowling of unspayed cats—came the rhythm of a slowing heartbeat. My own. The kite string that tethered me to the body on my bedroom floor was calling me home. I took hold of it like a zip line, shinning over El tracks and headlights and the minnow dart of bicyclists.
The candles we’d lit were flickering wax coins and my room was gray as a mourning dove. Before the sun could rise and mytether could break I slipped back inside myself, braced for the magnetized click of body and soul.
It didn’t come. Maybe, I thought, that was part of the transformation. Maybe it was within the slipstream drag of spirit moving within form that magic could play.
Fee was back from her own journey. I could feel her beside me, hand warm in mine. But on the other side of me, Marion lay still. Her hand was corn-husk light and her pulse too slow. I tried to sit up, to check on her.
I couldn’t. I couldn’t move at all, beyond a twitch of my fingers.
Just the realization made my throat tighten. The tightness slid sideways into panic. Not because the spell had gone wrong. It was working as it was meant to: we had entered this state together. We would come out that way, too. Until Marion returned, Fee and I would stay just like this.
I’d thought I’d felt fear before but it was nothing to what I felt then, still as waking death and listening to her pulse tick down, down, down. Caught in endless suspension, not breathing enough but not dying of it either. Waiting, in agony. Waiting.
Then, with a glittering rush and the scent of woodfire, she was back.
