“You know Sophie?”
“Do you know the founders of the country you come from?” She doesn’t wait for my answer. “The point is, that Mabon and our life here in the city goes on, whether you’re visiting us or not.”
“But the Wordwood—how can you access it here?”
“How can we not? The site’s stored in the computers that are housed in the basement of the university library.”
I suppose, in some ways, that explains a lot, but I’m still not comfortable with the idea of the Wordwood being here as well. Before the woman can access its site, I tell her that I’ve changed my mind. I call to Fritzie and he follows me back out onto the street— somewhat reluctantly, I think, until his ears suddenly prick up. I turn to see what’s caught his attention and can’t believe who I see coming down the street toward us.
“I was just thinking of you,” Gina says as she draws closer.
She looks the same as always, thin features, tall, rangy frame. She’s dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, a black cotton jacket overtop, wearing those crazy red and yellow cowboy boots that she always loved. Her dark curls spill out from under a wide-brimmed hat. Bending down, she accepts Fritzie’s wet kisses and lifts her face to me, smiling under the brim of her hat. I see the difference then. That haunted look I remember always being in her eyes those last few years isn’t present.
“Are you a … ghost?” I ask.
She laughs. “Are you?”
“No, but I’m not...”
“Dead,” she finishes for me when my voice trails off.
She sits down on the curb and Fritzie half crawls onto her lap, tail slapping the cobblestones. After a moment I sit down beside them.
“I guess it is confusing,” Gina adds.
She turns to look at me, her eyes merry. I can’t remember the last time I saw her genuinely happy. She was so sad, for so long.
“So ... do you live here?” I ask her.
She has to think about that for a moment. “I think so. I think someone needed to see me so badly that they dreamed me into being here.”
Me, I think. Only then I look at Fritzie, wriggling on her lap as she pats him. I remember what the woman in the store said when I asked if it was okay for him to be inside. Something about true dreamers always being welcome. I realize that I didn’t bring Fritzie here with me; he brought me.
“Did Fritzie ever talk to you?” I ask her. There are a hundred things I want to ask her, but this is what comes out.
She smiles and shakes her head. “But he’s a good listener. Aren’t you, my brave little boy?”
“I don’t understand any of this,” I say.
“That’s probably a step in the right direction,” Gina tells me.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, you know how you like to make sure everything fits in its proper little box.”
“I don’t.”
She ignores me because we both know it’s true. “I think it’s better to believe in what you don’t know. What you don’t know encompasses everything. Embrace it and you embrace the mystery of the world, of the whole universe. It brings you closer to the great spirit that made everything and to which everything returns when its time is done.”
I guess being here in dreamland is why that actually seems to make sense.
“What’s it like?” I ask her. “The place where we go when we die?”
She gives a slow shake of her head. “I don’t really know. I think I’m there and here at the same time and the me that’s here isn’t privy to everything the me that’s there knows.”
“Fritzie brought you here,” I say.
“I know.”
After that we don’t talk so much—or at least not about anything important. We go wandering through Sophie’s dream city like children on a holiday, curious about everything, unconcerned with the world where things fit into a box and make sense. We’re just being pals, the way we were before the world turned dark on Gina and I started figuring out what fit in which box and made sure it stayed that way.
When I finally wake up, I find that Fritzie has crawled up from the end of the bed to lie with his head beside me on the pillow. The first thing I see when I open my eyes is the wall of my bedroom, over the top of his head, looking between his ears. I remember Mabon and Gina, like being there with her really happened. The dream seems so vivid that I have trouble focusing on where I am. This world has the dreamlike quality, not simply at this moment, when I wake, but throughout the day.
I almost quit work that day, I hate being there so much, though of course I don’t. I can’t. I could never leave everybody hanging like that. But I find myself doodling during the morning meeting, and later on the phone, too. Sketches of what I remember of some of the places I saw in my dream. The funny cafe where we had lunch—all the umbrellas had the same red and yellow pattern as Gina’s boots. This odd street we followed that dwindled until it was only the narrowest of footpaths squeezed between two buildings. Fritzie having a staring contest with a cat, the old torn lying in the display window of an antique shop between a stuffed rooster and a stack of old books. And Gina, of course. The way the wind caught her hair, the crinkle of her smile, the laughter in her eyes.
They’re simple sketches, but they’re good, too. I can tell. The lines have character as I put them down.
That evening our walk takes Fritzie and me to Jilly’s studio where she and Wendy are sitting on the sofa, taking turns reading to each other from a new fairy tale picture book loosely based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream that’s going to be published in the fall. It’s something Wendy’s supposed to review for In the City, which is why they have this advance copy of it. Wendy’s particularly chuffed since she and the book’s illustrator share the same first name.
Fritzie immediately makes himself comfortable on the Murphy bed, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen folded back into the wall. I pull a chair over by the sofa.
“I’m so jealous,” Jilly says when I tell them my story and pull out my sketches.
I blink in surprise.
“Oh, not of these,” she says, tapping the sketches with a paint-stained nail. “Which are wonderful. I told you that you still had it, didn’t I just?”
“So you’re jealous because … ?”
“That you got to go to Mabon. I’ve been wanting to go there for simply forever ...”
Wendy nods in agreement.
“But we’re glad you got to go,” Jilly adds.
“And at least I’ve got a great new story for my tree,” Wendy says.
Wendy has an oak tree that she secretly planted in Fitzhenry Park and feeds with stories. I told you they were like fairy tale people. Who else would accept my story at face value?
“What was it like seeing Gina again?” Jilly asks.
“Weird,” I tell her. “It’s hard to explain. Mostly it was like we were just taking up from before—as though her death had never come in between. But then every once in a while I’d get this sudden, sharp ache in my heart and I’d remember. But before it could really take root, Gina would sweep it away with something outrageous or sweet or simply thoughtful.”
“You’re going back, right?” Wendy says.
“I’m certainly going to try.”
But whatever magic let me slip up on it sideways and take me away doesn’t come back. At least not for me. But I know Fritzie’s making regular trips to Mabon. I guess it’s not hard for him, being a true dreamer.
I finally log back on to the Wordwood site and get it to drop down a list of links on how to make a dog speak. There are well over three hundred entries, from the cauldron business that Holly told me about to this really convoluted process that wakes up the diluted animal blood many of us are supposed to have running through our veins, none of them really practical, or workable. Most of them are the kind of thing that you have to slip up on from the side, which isn’t very easy for a put-things-in-their-box person like me.
Holly doesn’t really seem s
urprised when I tell her where the Word-wood’s URL leads.
“But don’t you think it’s amazing?” I ask her.
She grins. “Of course it’s amazing. But then everything about the Wordwood is pretty much unbelievable and amazing.”
“Can a person be jaded by that sort of thing?”
“I suppose,” she says. “But wouldn’t that be sad?”
I nod in agreement.
I don’t expect Sophie to be able to help me get back to Mabon, and she can’t, though it’s not from a lack of desire on her part.
“I’d love to have all my friends there,” she says, “but I don’t make the rules.” Then she laughs. “I don’t even know if there are rules. I mean, why do some people see ghosts and fairies, while other people don’t? Or can’t?”
“Maybe some people are just gifted,” I say. “Or more observant.”
She grins. “I suppose. Or maybe they’re crazier.”
But I know what I’ll do if I do get back. I’ll find a travel agent and see if I can pick up the Mabon version of a rail pass, something that’ll let me travel back and forth at will, the way a rail pass lets you take any train you want. I mention this to whatever the entity is that talks to me from the Wordwood. We’ve struck up an e-mail correspondence. The reply I get reads:
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 08:10:20-0400
From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] Subject: Re: Rail passes and boxes
Why not? It seems worth a try. And boxes and magic aren’t mutually exclusive. After all, look at me.
The Wordwood
http://www.thewordwood.com/
I suppose that’s true. Anything can be categorized. But then I think of what Gina told me, about embracing one’s ignorance of the universe, and I think maybe that’s true as well. We can categorize what we know, put everything into its box as it fits. But we also have to leave our minds open to embrace the great mystery of the world—all those things we know nothing about. Because if we do that with an open and generous enough heart, we might find the mystery embracing us back.
I still miss Gina.
I heard a dog speak once.
I’ve been to the magical dream city of Mabon.
I’m drawing more and that’s sharpening my observational skills, because when I pay attention to the detail I can see, it reminds me about all the other detail that I can’t. At least not yet.
I think Robert Nathan was wrong about one thing. Trees and rocks do have their own fairy tales and legends. Everything does. The trouble is, we only ever understand our own. And so long as that’s all we do, we’re putting ourselves in a box that doesn’t simply categorize what we know, but also shuts us away from all we don’t.
Fritzie dreams well—I can tell by the way his tail beats against the comforter when he’s sleeping. Maybe tonight I’ll lie down beside him. We’ll be like a couple of spoons and my dreaming eyes will see how the world looks when viewed from between his ears.
Masking Indian
It’s the last thing I expect to find hanging on the wall of my apartment when I get home. I haven’t seen that costume in ten years, not since I left New Orleans. Back then it was hooked up in a place of honor on another wall, the one in Lawrence Boudreaux’s front room.
Larry died last year. I would’ve made it back for the funeral but I only heard about it afterward, when it was too late to go.
I drop my jacket and purse on the sofa now and slowly walk up to where that plumed extravaganza hangs. The colors are so bright they dull everything in my living room and I’m not exactly known for my good taste. The lime-green bust of Elvis sitting on top of my TV is perhaps the subtlest thing I own. What can I say? I like kitsch.
But this costume …
When I lift a hand to touch one of the plumes, the whole thing fades away before my fingers can make contact. It figures. I’ve been looking for years for a miracle to clear up the mess of my life, but when the impossible does come my way, this is what I get: a moment of special effects.
I stare at the wall where the costume was hanging. Thinking of it, of Chief Larry, wakes a flood of old memories that take me back to when I was a runaway, a little white girl looking for her black roots among the Black Indian tribes that rule the Mardi Gras.
“You’ll like this,” Wendy said. “Marley says she’s got a ghost in her apartment.”
Jilly looked up from her canvas to where Wendy sat on the Murphy bed at the other end of the studio, her blonde curls pressed up against the headboard, legs splayed out in front of her on the comforter.
“Who’s Marley?” Jilly asked.
“The art director’s new assistant at In the City. You met her at that party at Alan’s a couple of weeks ago.”
“I remember. She was the one with the bright red buzz cut and the pierced eyebrow, right?”
“That’s her.”
“But she’s not exactly the happiest camper, is she?” Jilly went on. “I remember being struck by how she seemed so outgoing, but there was all this other stuff going on behind her eyes.”
“Sounds like you’re describing yourself,” Wendy said.
Jilly laughed, but Wendy caught the momentary empathy that flickered in her friend’s sparkling blue eyes.
“So what kind of ghost does she have?” Jilly asked.
Wendy had to grin. “The ghost of a Big Chief’s Mardi Gras costume.”
Jilly put down her brush and came over to the bed.
“A what?” she asked.
“You know, one of those huge feather and sparkle affairs they wear in the parades.”
“Except it’s the ghost of it?”
“Mm-hmm,” Wendy said. “Except, how can an inanimate object even have a ghost? You’d think it’d have to be alive first… so that it could die and become a ghost, I mean.”
Jilly shook her head. “Everything has spirit.”
“Even a costume?”
“Maybe especially a costume. It’s already made to be a secret, isn’t it?”
“Or to hide one.”
Jilly got a dreamy look in her eyes. “The ghost of costume. I love it. Do you think she’d let us see it?”
“I’ll have to ask.”
“A long time ago,” the old black man says. “Back when we were slaves. The only ones who welcomed us here were the Indians. That’s why we respect them like we do, why we call up their spirits with the drumming and parades.”
He was brought up in one of those Black Indian tribes in New Orleans: a Flagboy, running information from the Spyboys to the Second Chiefs; a Wildman with the buffalo horns poking out of his headdress, scattering the crowds when they got too close to the chiefs and could maybe mess up the ornate costumes; finally a Big Chief, Chief Larry of the Wild Eagles, squaring off against the other chiefs, spasm band setting up a polyrhythmic racket at his back while he strutted his stuff.
I can’t keep my gaze off the outfit where it’s hooked up on the wall of his home—a spirit guide, he tells me. An altar and a personal shield, a reflection of his soul.
It boggles my mind. I can’t imagine how much it cost to put that fantastic explosion of flash and thunder together. It’s a masterpiece of dyed plumes, papier-mache and broken glass, peacock and turkey feathers, glass beads, eggshells, sequins and fish scales, velvet and sparkles and lord knows what else. The headdress rises three feet above the top of his head when he puts it on and the whole costume has to weigh a hundred or so pounds, but he can carry it like it has no weight at all.
Tired as he was last night, he didn’t let that stop him. He was up the whole night before, sewing and helping others in the tribe with their suits. He marched twenty or thirty miles through the city yesterday, carried his tribe through over a dozen confrontations with other tribes, drank straight vinegar to cut the cramps, but he was still so swollen when he got home last night that they had to cut him out of his suit.
Yeah, he’s something, Chief Larry, but he’s still got time to
talk to a street kid like me.
“Thing is,” he says, “people forget this wasn’t always a show. Time was we governed the neighborhoods. We kept the music and spirit alive—hell, we were priest and police, all in one. Masking Indian was just a little piece of what the tribes were all about. We were like the spiritual churches then—we looked after the souls of our people.”
“What happened?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Progress happened.”
He says the word “progress” like it’s an epithet. I guess for him it is.
I don’t know why he ever took to me. Maybe he felt sorry for me. Maybe he just liked the idea of helping a little white runaway connect with the black blood that she got from her great-grandpa, blood so thin it doesn’t show any more than the winter coat of a hare against a snowdrift. But he lets me hang around the Wild Eagles’ practices. I sit in the back and bang away on a cowbell, adding my own little clangs to the throbbing, primal rhythm of bass and snare drums, tambourines, congas, percussion sticks, pebble gourds, bucket drums and anything that can make a noise and fill out the beat.
The tempo just keeps building until everything seems like total pandemonium, but Chief Larry’s actually exercising a strict spiritual and physical control over the proceedings. Comes a moment when everything feels transcendent, like we’re plugging straight into the heart of some deep, old, primal magic. When we’re one, all the Wild Eagles, everybody in that room.
It’s better than crack, but just as addictive.
“Sometimes,” he tells me, “people ought to just leave well enough alone. Everything’s moving too fast these days. We’re so busy, we can’t see what’s in front of our noses anymore. We don’t need to know everything that’s happening, every place in the world, every damn second of the day.”
He pauses to look at me, to make sure he’s got my attention.
“What we need,” he goes on, “is to connect to what’s around us and the spirit that moves through it. Our families, our neighbors, the neighborhood.”
“The tribe,” I say.
“Same difference.”