An Algonquin legend describes the wendigo as a “giant with a heart of ice. Sometimes it was thought to be entirely made of ice. Its body is skeletal and deformed, with missing lips and toes.” The Algonquin people claimed that during the early part of the 20th century, a significant number of people went mysteriously missing. The tribes attributed these disappearances to the wendigo, calling it the “spirit of lonely places.”
There was a walking meditation I had done, with Marianne and a small group of people, in which we were blindfolded and asked to walk around the room. When we encountered another person, we were encouraged to explore their physical presence, while being mindful of inappropriate touching, and to tune into spaces in the room that might feel lonely, overlooked or neglected. What lonely spaces are calling to you, was what the woman leading the meditation had said. I remember being drawn to a particular corner, where I stayed, in a kneeling position, for what felt like a very long time.
There lay the casket, in the center of a damp room, an elegant horizontal initiate ready to receive first and last offerings. Burnished cherrywood veneer, its interior lined with pale pink, the color of reprieve or fresh heaven. The softly flickering symmetry of candlelight in which the room was lit, bathed the casket in a gauzy lemon aureole.
If you were to enter the room in this warehouse, now, right now, you would see the Red Joans standing in line, each girl waiting her turn to make a deposit into the casket, to bequeath a token to her soul-let.
Hairbrush. Chewed-through pencil. Bottle of lavender nail polish. Cover artwork for a Mazzy Star CD. Pink tutu. Handcuffs. Dog-eared copy of Plato’s Republic. Tube of lipstick. Vintage French postcard. Scissors. Spatula. Torn purple leggings. Paintbrush. Cordless microphone.
The Red Joans were attending a funeral for their dreams. The ceremony, which took place one week before the scheduled death-date of a group, was intended to honor and consecrate the fact that its members were giving up their lives and their dreams for a greater cause. They were saying goodbye to who they were, or who they might have grown into.
If you were there, right now, trespassing in the smallest hours, you would see that some of the Joans wept themselves into convulsions, while others cried soundlessly, cheeks scarred in gleaming silver. Others remained neutral and became as glass mirroring stones. Everyone grieved differently. No one was judged.
Blonde thimbles of sunlight pour onto and speckle the faded terra-cotta roofs, the play of light on hidden scars, the song with unremembered lyrics. Four towels draped on the railing of a terrace to air-dry. Two green, one blue, one red. The towels feel their monotony broken when a warm, blossom-infused breeze fingers the towels, forcing them to dance, to ruffle, seizures of a short-lived flirtation. At the same time, a delicate orgy of bright pink hibiscus petals are picked up and scattered across the cobbled stones. The breeze finishes, ending the tryst. The towels flatten, fall out of love. The petals rest vagrantly. And dream, in color, of haiku frontiers. Viola tries to walk even slower on the asymmetry of cobblestone, hoping to feel the sky beneath the ground, its motherlode a ballad on the lips of the universe, here, now.
We stayed up until dawn. We talked a lot, covering a wide range of topics, from werewolves to failed relationships to family dysfunction. We watched the Home Shopping Network, Callie pretending to buy things, then we watched several episodes of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross. Callie confessed to having a huge crush on Bob Ross. She said he was the television incarnation of the Buddha. Also, she likened him to Winnie the Pooh. Buddha the Pooh, she called him. Bob Ross’s calming presence and soothing voice had seen Callie through many nights of insomnia. We listened to Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate. Callie clutched my hand tightly for the duration of the album, her nails occasionally digging into my palms. Do you remember that night in the car, Callie spoke in a soft voice, flashing an easy, mischievous smile. That night I drove you to the airport. I remember, I said. Were you surprised? I was, I said. Leonard Cohen crooned on, somewhere between the gallows and the gates of heaven. Callie told me we should go to her bedroom.
Evie laughed to herself. It was just acting. Then again, she often did have trouble determining where she ended and someone else began. She wasn’t sure if this was a side-effect to acting, or to existing. Or if there was even a difference between the two. When she searched herself, what she found was: she didn’t really care where she ended and someone else began, or vice-versa. She relished her loss of awareness when slipping into other personas. And whatever persona adopted, there wasn’t any genuine attachment, because she would be operating from a place of void. One was the same as the other as the other. None of them were her. And she wasn’t her. The void signed off on everything. In invisible ink. With nesting doll instincts she dreamed she was someone else, and that someone dreamed they were someone else, and that someone didn’t dream at all. That someone was the last straw, the dreamless one, the tenant of emptiness. You never come up against void. That never happens. You come up against your resistance to void, that’s what stops you, freezes you in your tracks. Void is something you pass right through. No doors, no barriers, no parameters, no anything. You glide right through on pixelated skates, and then realize, in ways that are both terrifying and liberating, the endlessness to emptiness. A form of self-mutiny occurs, and everyone you thought you were is thrown overboard and there are no life preservers. That is when you feel the ghost that you always were and always had been, that is when you become haunted by the tenuous proximity to your own ghost-life. Evie knew from a relatively young age that others could sense the void in her, and they swarmed like frenzied moths to its glaring white absence. People were magnetically drawn to Evie’s void, because it was easy to project into. There was nothing there. They could simultaneously confront and evade, look into and turn away from their own voids, by allowing themselves to pool inside of Evie’s secret two-way mirror.
I am running. It feels like I’ve been running for a long time. I want to turn around and look behind me but my neck is locked into place. So I can’t see who or what is chasing me, but I know it’s a werewolf. I want to know what kind of werewolf it is. It feels very important to know its shape and size, whether it’s running on two legs or four.
Now I am in the trees. Or it’s another me, a different me, one that is like a presence, or wind. This me moves through the trees and watches the running me who is still being chased by the werewolf, which looks like a dark four-legged mass. Like an inkblot with legs. The werewolf is nipping at the heels of running me and I watch as running me is finally able to move her neck and turn around to see what’s chasing her and that’s when her head falls off.
The head, detached, may start a life all its own. A job, kids, all of it.
Does Bevel know that the color of Lucy’s soul is autumn?
As Lucy danced, I could see her branches sprouting in different directions, while yellow leaves flew everywhere, like star-pointed birds.
You want to kiss me really, really bad, don’t you? I stared into Lucy’s lacquered eyes, then tracked to her crescent-shaped scar and hung there, waiting for my words to catch up to me. I’ve had a lot of blues and greens tonight, I said, and conscientiously ran my fingers through my hair, as if that were something a person who had drunk a lot of blues and greens might do. Then I opened my eyes, not realizing they had been closed, and saw that I was in a corner, near the restroom, sucking my thumb, and Lucy was nowhere in the vicinity. I unplugged my thumb from my mouth, and stepped forward, scanning the club. There she was. Dancing with Bevel to the Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon.” Lucy was wearing a paisley cotton dress, which clung to the upper half of her body and flared at the hem. Her tennis shoes were impossibly white.
When Evie disappeared, I wondered about all sorts of things, including my own sense of reality. I wondered about the photos of Evie I had burned, and the five that remained, and what their place in my life had become, or would become. We are made up so much more of what we are not than of what we are. This was one of Evie’s refrains, one which she didn’t speak glumly or tragically or even with a sense of wonder, but rather as a neutral stating of physics, of dreams and psychic bundles. And while Evie’s disappearance did leave a deep emotional imprint on me, a scarring one, it also felt like a test. As if reality, as a strident quizmaster, had issued the challenge—Evie? Evie, who, exactly?
Astronomers theorized that, based on its chemical make-up, the dust from the nebula that gave birth to our sun would taste like raspberries. And the closer you get to a black hole, the slower time runs. So, I reason, following someone down a rabbit hole can also double as following them into a black hole, where the closer you get to its mysterious center, the slower time runs, and eventually you reach the point of no return, the event horizon, and you watch yourself freeze into a phantom imprint, the X-ray of a void, and this dissolved incarnation of you continues plunging into the dark wonder, the atomizing tantalus of the abyss.
My sixth novel, No One Dreams in Color, started as a story, titled Wendigo. Which then became a film script. Which eventually turned into a novel revolving around a man, Paul Kirby, who had written a story which he had turned into a script that was then made into a nine-minute film, Wendigo, whose blue mood conjured the spirit of lonely places. Paul Kirby mysteriously disppears in the high desert town of Nine Peaks. And from there, a tale of metaphysical noir begins its rabbit hole plunge and boogie. Here is a small dose of No One Dreams in Color:
We were sitting at a café in the Mission called Havana, which had a Cuban theme. Framed photos of Cuban street life and culture adorned the café’s pale orange walls. A Cuban flag was pinned horizontally to the wall behind the counter. A stack of cigar magazines were laid out on a metal coffee table in the center of the café. One of the magazines had a cover photo of a snow-bearded Hemingway, with a thick cigar plugged into his mouth. Lucy said that Havana was one of her favorite haunts. I found it oddly touching that she had used the word haunt. Outside, a cold rain was falling, which made me feel like a real detective. Or rather, like a real detective from the movies. Here I was, in a café, on a rainy day, sitting across from a woman who didn’t match her name, and was the old flame of a man who had disappeared, a man whose ghost I was stalking. It was a movie I had seen before, wrapped within dozens of other movies. Except I was in it, though there was no one watching me from the cushy perspective of passive audience. Or was there? I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching. Always watching. No wonder Santa Claus was such a polarizing figure.
My novel, The Last Furies, was partly inspired by the life, legend and poetic reckoning of the Symbolist brat-prince, Arthur Rimbaud. As a hybrid work, that is both an endless remix of a novel and a sorcerer’s cryptic handbook, the Furies at its molten core is a call to radical alchemy, to the transformative power of language, myth and story. It is about deep dreaming and even deeper rememberance. And it wears the mantra of John Coltrane on the torn sleeve of its heart: “You’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new way.” Here’s a small dose from Furies:
The play opens with a bang, followed by a whimper. The bang, that of a pot crashing to the floor. It was his mother, rheumatic, bleary eyes, an aproned trapezoid, who had burned her hand on the pot handle and cursed filthily in peasant-French, as the pot hit the kitchen floor, BANG, and the sauce splatted like fairytale blood. Then came the whimper, escaping through the boy’s nostrils like a small wound announcing itself musically. The boy, fair-haired, blade-boned, waifish, attempting to absorb and comprehend the architecture that is his mother, wagging her singed beefy hand ridged with sawtooth knuckles, his mother continuing to run coarse French profanities up a flagpole, his mother. The boy, turning to the audience: I see her standing there and everything about her seems inappropriate, foreign, undesirable. What am I doing there in the kitchen? How did I fit in? My mother struck me as an ugly ominous preview of a culture that I rejected and despised on intuitive forecast alone. I knew before I knew. I had been born into a culture of organ-harvesters and eunuch-makers. I had sniffed out the war-mongering and indoctrination from the tender side of the womb. The chairs, the rolling pin, the forks and knives, the dropped pot, all of these belonged there, but me . . . It was like waking up in someone else’s dream, not just once, but always, a dream with scene changes so as to give the impression that things were moving, cycling, different, but really…
