Still, I can’t help but hear under the one story he tells, another story. One of cocktail parties and high-rise offices, stocks and mergers, of drops in the market and job losses, alcohol and divorce. He’s managed to recast the tragedy of his life into a story from an old picture book. King Arthur. Prince Valiant. The man who lost his job, his wife, and his family, who ended up dying, homeless and alone on the streets where he lived, is an errant knight in the story he tells.
I know this, but I can’t see it. Like the crow girls, I’m swallowed by the fairy tale.
The dead man tells now of that day’s hunting in the forests near the castle. How his horse is startled by an owl and rears back, throwing him into a steep crevice where he cracks his head on a stone outcrop. The hawk flies from his wrist as he falls, the laces of its hood catching on a branch and tugging off its hood. The hound comes down to investigate, licks his face, then lies down beside him.
When night falls, the horse and hound emerge from the forest. Alone. They approach the King’s castle, the hawk flying overhead. And there, the ghost tells us, while his own corpse lies at the bottom of the crevice, his lady stands with another man’s arm around her shoulders.
“And then,” the ghost says, “the corbies came for their dinner and what baubles they could find.”
I open my eyes and blink, startled for a moment to find myself still in Old Market. The scene before me hasn’t changed. One of the crow girls has cut off the corpse’s braid and now she’s rummaging through the items spilled from the shopping cart.
“That’s us,” the other girl says. “We were the corbies. Did we eat you?”
“What sort of baubles?” her companion wants to know. She holds up a Crackerjack ring that she’s found among the litter of the ghost’s belongings. “You mean like this?”
The ghost doesn’t reply. He stands up and the crow girls scramble to their feet as well.
“It’s time for me to go,” he says.
“Can I have this?” the crow girl holding the Crackerjack ring asks.
The other girl looks at the ring that’s now on her twin’s finger. “Can I have one, too?”
The first girl hands her twin the braid of hair that she’s cut from the corpse.
After his first decisive statement, the ghost now stands there looking lost.
“But I don’t know where to go,” he says.
The crow girls return their attention to him.
“We can show you,” the one holding the braid tells him.
Her twin nods. “We’ve been there before.”
I watch them as they each take one of his hands and walk with him toward the river. When they reach the low wall, the girls become crows again, flying on either side of the dead man’s ghostly figure as he steps through the wall and continues to walk, up into the sky. For one long moment the impossible image holds, then they all disappear. Ghost, crow girls, all.
I sit there for a while longer before I finally manage to stand up and walk over to the shopping cart. I bend down and touch the corpse’s throat, two fingers against the carotid artery, searching for a pulse. There isn’t any.
I look around and see a face peering down at me from a second-floor window. It’s an old woman and I realize I saw her earlier, that she’s been there all along. I walk toward her house and knock on the door.
It seems to take forever for anyone to answer, but finally a light comes on in the hall and the door opens. The old woman I saw upstairs is standing there, looking at me.
“Do you have a phone?” I ask. “I need to call 911.”
3
What a night it had been, Gerda thought.
She stood on her front steps with the rather self-contained young woman who’d introduced herself as Jilly, not quite certain what to do, what was expected at a time such as this. At least the police had finally gone away, taking that poor homeless man’s body with them, though they had left behind his shopping cart and the scatter of his belongings that had been strewn about it.
“I saw you watching from the window,” Jilly said. “You saw it all, but you didn’t say anything about the crow girls.”
Gerda smiled. “Crow girls. I like that. It suits them.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I didn’t think they’d believe me.” She paused for a moment, then added, “Why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea?”
“I’d like that.”
Gerda knew that her kitchen was clean, but terribly old-fashioned. She didn’t know what her guest would think of it. The wooden kitchen table and chairs were the same ones she and Jan had bought when they’d first moved in, more years past than she cared to remember. A drip had put a rusty stain on the porcelain of her sink that simply couldn’t be cleaned. The stove and fridge were both circa 1950—bulky, with rounded corners. There was a long wooden counter along one wall with lots of cupboards and shelves above and below it, all loaded with various kitchen accoutrements and knickknacks. The window over the sink was hung with lacy curtains, the sill a jungle of potted plants.
But Jilly seemed delighted by her surroundings. While Gerda started the makings for tea, putting the kettle on the stove, teacups on the table, she got milk from the fridge and brought the sugar bowl to the table.
“Did you know him?” Gerda asked.
She took her Brown Betty teapot down from the shelf. It was rarely used anymore. With so few visitors, she usually made her tea in the cup now.
“The man who died,” she added.
“Not personally. But I’ve seen him around—on the streets. I think his name was Hamish. Or at least that’s what people called him.”
“The poor man.”
Jilly nodded. “It’s funny. You forget that everyone’s got their own movie running through their heads. He’d pretty much hit rock bottom here, in the world we all share, but the whole time, in his own mind, he was living the life of a questing knight. Who’s to say which was more real?”
When the water began to boil, Gerda poured some into the pot to warm it up. Emptying the pot into the sink, she dropped in a pair of teabags and filled the pot, bringing it to the table to steep. She sat down across from her guest, smoothing down her skirt. The cats finally came in to have a look at the company, Swarte Meg first, slipping under the table and up onto Gerda’s lap. The other two watched from the doorway.
“Did . . . we really see what I think we saw?” Gerda asked after a moment’s hesitation.
Jilly smiled. “Crow girls and a ghost?”
“Yes. Were they real, or did we imagine them?”
“I’m not sure it’s important to ask if they were real or not.”
“Whyever not?” Gerda said. “It would be such a comfort to know for certain that some part of us goes on.”
To know there was a chance one could be joined once more with those who had gone on before. But she left that unsaid.
Jilly leaned her elbow on the table, chin on her hand, and looked toward the window, but was obviously seeing beyond the plants and the view on the far side of the glass panes, her gaze drawn to something that lay in an unseen distance.
“I think we already know that,” she finally said.
“I suppose.”
Jilly returned her attention to Gerda.
“You know,” she said. “I’ve seen those crow girls before, too—just as girls, not as crows—but I keep forgetting about them, the way the world forgets about people like Hamish.” She sat up straighter. “Think how dull we’d believe the world to be without them to remind us . . . .”
Gerda waited a moment, watching her guest’s gaze take on that dreamy distant look once more.
“Remind us of what?” she asked after a moment.
Jilly smiled again. “That anything is possible.”
Gerda thought about that. Her own gaze went to the window. Outside she caught a glimpse of two crows, flying across the city skyline. She stroked Swarte Meg’s soft black fur and gave a slow nod. After what she had seen
tonight she could believe it, that anything was possible.
She remembered her husband Jan—not as he’d been in those last years before the illness had taken him, but before that. When they were still young. When they had just married and all the world and life lay ahead of them. That was how she wanted it to be when she finally joined him again.
If anything was possible, then that was how she would have it be.
The Fields Beyond the Fields
I just see my life better in ink.
—Jewel Kilcher, from an interview on MuchMusic, 1997
Saskia is sleeping, but I can’t. I sit up at my rolltop desk, writing. It’s late, closer to dawn than midnight, but I’m not tired. Writing can be good for keeping sleep at bay. It also helps me make sense of things where simply thinking about them can’t. It’s too easy to get distracted by a wayward digression when the ink’s not holding the thoughts to paper. By focusing on the page, I can step outside myself and look at the puzzle with a clearer eye.
Earlier this evening Saskia and I were talking about magic and wonder, about how it can come and go in your life, or more particularly, how it comes and goes in my life. That’s the side of me that people don’t get to see when all they can access is the published page. I’m as often a skeptic as a believer. I’m not the one who experiences those oddities that appear in the stories; I’m the one who chronicles the mystery of them, trying to make sense out of what they can impart about us, our world, our preconceptions of how things should be.
The trouble is, mostly life seems to be exactly what it is. I can’t find the hidden card waiting to be played because it seems too apparent that the whole hand is already laid out on the table. What you see is what you get, thanks, and do come again.
I want there to be more.
Even my friends assume I’m the knowledgeable expert who writes the books. None of them knows how much of a hypocrite I really am. I listen well and I know exactly what to say to keep the narrative flowing. I can accept everything that’s happened to them—the oddest and most absurd stories they tell me don’t make me blink an eye—but all the while there’s a small voice chanting in the back of my head.
As if, as if, as if . . . .
I wasn’t always like this, but I’m good at hiding how I’ve changed, from those around me, as well as from myself.
But Saskia knows me too well.
“You used to live with a simple acceptance of the hidden world,” she said when the conversation finally turned into a circle and there was nothing new to add. “You used to live with magic and mystery, but now you only write about it.”
I didn’t know how to reply.
I wanted to tell her that it’s easy to believe in magic when you’re young. Anything you couldn’t explain was magic then. It didn’t matter if it was science or a fairy tale. Electricity and elves were both infinitely mysterious and equally possible—elves probably more so. It didn’t seem particularly odd to believe that actors lived inside your TV set. That there was a repertory company inside the radio, producing its chorus of voices and music. That a fat, bearded man lived at the North Pole and kept tabs on your behavior.
I wanted to tell her that I used to believe she was born in a forest that only exists inside the nexus of a connection of computers, entangled with one another where they meet on the World Wide Web. A Wordwood that appears in pixels on the screen, but has another, deeper existence somewhere out there in the mystery that exists concurrent to the Internet, the way religion exists in the gathering of like minds.
But not believing in any of it now, I wasn’t sure that I ever had.
The problem is that even when you have firsthand experience with a piece of magic, it immediately begins to slip away. Whether it’s a part of the enchantment, or some inexplicable defense mechanism that’s been wired into us either by society or genetics, it doesn’t make any difference. The magic still slips away, sliding like a melted icicle along the slick surface of our memories.
That’s why some people need to talk about it—the ones who want to hold on to the marvel of what they’ve seen or heard or felt. And that’s why I’m willing to listen, to validate their experience and help them keep it alive. But there’s no one around to validate mine. They think my surname Riddell is a happy coincidence, that it means I’ve solved the riddles of the world instead of being as puzzled by them as they are. Everybody assumes that I’m already in that state of grace where enchantment lies thick in every waking moment, and one’s dreams—by way of recompense, perhaps?—are mundane.
As if, as if, as if . . . .
The sigh that escapes me seems self-indulgent in the quiet that holds the apartment. I pick up my pen, put it down when I hear a rustle of fabric, the creak of a spring as the sofa takes someone’s weight. The voice of my shadow speaks then, a disembodied voice coming to me from the darkness beyond the spill of the desk’s lamplight, but tonight I don’t listen to her. Instead I take down volumes of my old journals from where they’re lined up on top of my desk. I page through the entries, trying to see if I’ve really changed. And if so, when.
I don’t know what makes sense anymore; I just seem to know what doesn’t.
When I was young, I liked to walk in the hills behind our house, looking at animals. Whether they were big or small, it made no difference to me. Everything they did was absorbing. The crow’s lazy flight. A red squirrel scolding me from the safety of a hemlock branch, high overhead. The motionless spider in a corner of its patient web. A quick russet glimpse of a fox before it vanished in the high weeds. The water rat making its daily journeys across Jackson’s Pond and back. A tree full of cedar waxwings, gorging on berries. The constantly shifting pattern of a gnat ballet.
I’ve never been able to learn what I want about animals from books or nature specials on television. I have to walk in their territories, see the world as they might see it. Walk along the edges of the stories they know.
The stories are the key, because for them, for the animals, everything that clutters our lives, they keep in their heads. History, names, culture, gossip, art. Even their winter and summer coats are only ideas, genetic imprints memorized by their DNA, coming into existence only when the seasons change.
I think their stories are what got me writing. First in journals, accounts as truthful as I could make them, then as stories where actuality is stretched and manipulated, because the lies in fiction are such an effective way to tell emotional truths. I took great comfort in how the lines of words marched from left to right and down the page, building up into a meaningful structure like rows of knitting. Sweater stories. Mitten poems. Long, rambling journal entries like the scarves we used to have when we were kids, scarves that seemed to go on forever.
I never could hold the stories in my head, though in those days I could absorb them for hours, stretched out in a field, my gaze lost in the expanse of forever sky above. I existed in a timeless place then, probably as close to Zen as I’ll ever get again. Every sense alert, all existence focused on the present moment. The closest I can come to recapturing that feeling now is when I set pen to paper. For those brief moments when the words flow unimpeded, everything I am is simultaneously focused into one perfect detail and expanded to encompass everything that is. I own the stories in those moments, I am the stories, though, of course, none of them really belongs to me. I only get to borrow them. I hold them for a while, set them down on paper, and then let them go.
I can own them again, when I reread them, but then so can anyone.
According to Jung, at around the age of six or seven we separate and then hide away the parts of ourselves that don’t seem acceptable, that don’t fit in the world around us. Those unacceptable parts that we secret away become our shadow.
I remember reading somewhere that it can be a useful exercise to visualize the person our shadow would be if it could step out into the light. So I tried it. It didn’t work immediately. For a long time, I was simply talking to myself. Then, when I did get a respons
e, it was only a spirit voice I heard in my head. It could just as easily have been my own. But over time, my shadow took on more physical attributes, in the way that a story grows clearer and more pertinent as you add and take away words, molding its final shape.
Not surprisingly, my shadow proved to be the opposite of who I am in so many ways. Bolder, wiser, with a better memory and a penchant for dressing up with costumes, masks, or simply formal wear. A cocktail dress in a raspberry patch. A green man mask in a winter field. She’s short, where I’m tall. Dark-skinned, where I’m light. Red-haired, where mine’s dark. A girl to my boy, and now a woman as I’m a man.
If she has a name, she’s never told me it. If she has an existence outside the times we’re together, she has yet to divulge it either. Naturally I’m curious about where she goes, but she doesn’t like being asked questions and I’ve learned not to press her because when I do, she simply goes away.
Sometimes I worry about her existence. I get anxieties about schizophrenia and carefully study myself for other symptoms. But if she’s a delusion, it’s singular, and otherwise I seem to be as normal as anyone else, which is to say, confused by the barrage of input and stimuli with which the modern world besets us, and trying to make do. Who was it that said she’s always trying to understand the big picture, but the trouble is, the picture just keeps getting bigger? Ani DiFranco, I think.
Mostly I don’t get too analytical about it—something I picked up from her, I suppose, since left to my own devices, I can worry the smallest detail to death.
We have long conversations, usually late at night, when the badgering clouds swallow the stars and the darkness is most profound. Most of the time I can’t see her, but I can hear her voice. I like to think we’re friends; even if we don’t agree about details, we can usually find common ground on how we’d like things to be.
There are animals in the city, but I can’t read their stories the same as I did the ones that lived in the wild. In the forested hills of my childhood.