14
I slump in the chair, percolating with anger. Damn Daniel. I want to feel ticked off at Carla, too, but I can’t. She’s a true professional and loyal to me. She only did what she thought was right. He’s the malefactor.
I feel awake and exhausted at the same time. Awake mind, exhausted body. Or is it the other way around? Exhausted mind, awake body. Either way, I hate that insomniac feeling.
Go back to bed?
Get up?
Get up, definitely. Find the nearest Starbucks and forge on with my new life. No one is going to yank me back into the past.
I hear that peculiar gentle bubbling sound I heard last night, switch on a lamp, and tiptoe across the living room through Stanley’s trash, searching for the source.
What do you know? Stanley did keep pets.
On a built-in shelf stands a capacious aquarium, I’m guessing twenty gallons. An air filter gently bubbles and aquatic plants shimmy in the circulating water. A dozen little fish drowse in their tiny sea beneath the slab of a glass lid. Dazzling yellow daubs lacy dorsal fins, incandescent blue streaks lateral lines, and a particularly startling scarlet adorns ornamental caudal fins.
Just what I don’t need in my life right now–babies. Water babies.
A cardboard box of fish food perches next to the tank, plus a Post-it with the word “CAUTION!” scrawled in red Magic Marker and underscored three times.
Hmm. The angelfish look happy enough to me. And harmless. I’ll deal with the CAUTION! part later.
Now I eye the pizza boxes stacked in a corner from floor to ceiling, the spine of each box emblazoned with the name of the purveyor, Too Cool Pizza. What had possessed poor old Stanley to accumulate such a pile? Why didn’t he toss each box after he’d chowed down his pie? How lazy was the wing nut, anyway? What if the boxes have attracted vermin? Ants or cockroaches or worse?
And how long will it take me to break down the stack, flatten each box, and haul everything out to the Dumpsters?
Large blue letters accompany the purveyor’s name:
PLEASE RECYCLE PLEASE
“No kidding. Please recycle.”
The boxes stir, rustle. Bugs, I knew it. Maybe mice.
“Thanks a bunch, Stanley. Please recycle, indeed.”
A bigger stir, a more robust rustle, and suddenly my pulse pounds in my throat. I hear Mama’s gentle quaver echoing in my mind, “Abby, never forget the fireflies.”
With simple words and concentration and something else–but what?–I invoked a spell that summer’s eve. A natural spell without hat or robe or wand. Without gimmicks or obscure words.
With my power. Only with my power surging out of some secret source inside me. And that with all-important concentration, the reduction of thought and desire to a single, focused point. That summer’s eve, I had needed light. More light.
And now? Now I need to bring order to the chaos Stanley has left behind. I need to clear the space. Clear the space.
An opportunity to try out Real Magic? I think so.
I loosen up my neck and shoulders and flex my hands, spreading my fingers out in a dramatic gesture. I plant my feet firmly in front of the stack, take a deep breath, and command, “Please Recycle Please.”
The boxes stir, rustle, shiver. Nothing more. Running my eyes up and down the stack, I realize they’re too jam-packed to budge an inch.
Ah-ha. I seize the edge of a box in the middle of the stack and pry it out, twisting and tugging on the cardboard and staggering back when I finally jerk it free and drop the thing on the floor.
And louder, “Please Recycle Please!”
The top box, no longer crammed so tightly against the ceiling, quivers, vibrates, wriggles. Yes! The box pulls itself out the way you open a drawer, shoves in, pulls out, shoves in, pulls out and out and out. One last twist and a yank and the box frees itself, hovers in boxy surprise, and spreads lid from bottom like a pair of great white wings. The box flaps raggedly around the living room, scattering dried crusts and cheese crumbs.
I wiggle my fingers, open and close them. I’m not sure if power is flowing from my hands and propelling the box or if the rustic spell itself animates the greasy cardboard without the help of my hands.
The next box shivers and wriggles and pries itself loose, spreads lid from bottom, and flaps around the room, bumping into walls, swooping, smashing into tables, knocking over candelabras and lanterns and lamps.
“PLEASE RECYCLE PLEASE!”
Another box and another box and another lift off and spread their lids, till every box flaps frantically around the living room, butting furiously into everything, but mostly banging against the flowery Indian bedspreads thumb-tacked over the windows.
A box flings itself at me and strikes my forehead with a hard cardboard corner, swoops around and strikes again. Ouch and ouch! I duck and cover, shielding face and head with my hands.
What the hell do the boxes want?
They want to Please Recycle Please, of course.
Happy to oblige. I crawl through the flapping swarm to the nearest window, seize and rip the Indian bedspread off the wall. The bedspread plummets onto my head, scattering thumbtacks, safety pins, and garlands of garlic bulbs on the floor all around me.
I shove the bedspread off and eagerly gaze up. What to expect? And oh! The window is the beauty I hoped it would be: tall, elegant, and arched, the double panes inset with wrought-iron mullions in bold geometric designs. Signs of protection? Runes, maybe? Runes, definitely.
I glance over my shoulder at the frenzied pizza boxes, lurch to my feet, and seize the wrought-iron handles that latch and lock the panes. I pull the handles down and fling the panes outward, opening them wide.
Then I drop to the floor again, ducking and covering.
The pizza boxes gather themselves into your classic V-shaped flock-of-geese formation. The lead box guides the others out the window and the boxes–truly as majestic as migrating geese–stream above me, dropping dried crusts and cheese crumbs in my hair.
Which is okay. It’s not goose poop.
I watch the boxes wing their way up the side drive, heading for the Dumpsters. Don’t you love ecologically responsible pizza boxes?
* * *
And I’m off, invigorated by the simple exercise of my power. I’m feeling pretty awesome, actually. Magic college is going to be a breeze.
I hike down midcentury Berkeley sidewalks cracked and tilted by tree roots, stoop beneath fragrant boughs of purple wisteria drooping from the corners of rooftops. Where to? I’m bound for the Bank of America to perform my first duties of the day as super.
I am dressed for success: a pink tank top over a sports bra, sage linen shorts, Smart-wool athletic socks, black Puma running shoes. The only jewelry, my Eye and my Cross at my throat. My blue nylon butt-bag strapped around my waist is packed with my cell phone, house keys, driver’s license, Stanley’s release, and my bloodstained employment contract. I clutch the olive-drab bank deposit bag in my fist. I will deposit those checks today or die trying.
Despite the morning’s brilliance and the flowers’ fragrance, I’m beset by an odd unease. The farther I hike, the more uneasy I feel.
I whirl around, convinced someone is following me. Watching me.
What would the Horde look like? I wonder. Would they have fangs, horns, wings, tails? Or resemble that most fearsome and dangerous of creatures—a human being?
Black hoods, black masks, black cloaks.
But there’s no one. No students, no locals, no suspicious characters loitering in the bushes behind me. I read on the Internet that a rash of street robberies has plagued Berkeley lately, but I see no hoodies from Dog Town or gangstahs from Ghost Town. No one in a car, no one on a bike. Nothing lies behind me but the rumpled gardens of Derby Street. Not a cat, a dog, or a squirrel.
I should feel good about that, but I don’t. I don’t. It feels too empty. As if some power has cleared a void around me.
I turn the corner at Derby and hike onto Telegraph Avenue. The Av, the locals call it, a narrow venue of commerce and culture catering mostly to the University and the shifting populace of students and other transients. Yawning street vendors set up their card tables and unload merchandise from aging VW vans. The tables offer jewelry and exotic trinkets, cheap but pretty in the morning light. Amid the big franchise stores peddling cell phones and electronics, you can still find quirky little shops like Filthy Dripped, the Buffalo Exchange, and Lhasa Karnak Herbs (Since 1967). Boys and girls in black nail polish queue up outside Zebra Tattoos and Piercings. I hear the ratcheting buzz of the tattoo machine, smell burning flesh.
Light flickers behind my left shoulder and pain pokes my shoulder as if someone has jabbed me with, well, a steel knitting needle. I whirl around, stomach clenching. What is it?
Sunlight flashing off a windshield? But a flash of light wouldn’t poke me.
There’s nothing. Nothing I can see, anyway.
I really, really don’t like it.
I stride inside the Bank of America, find the account manager’s desk beside the tellers’ windows, and unload my arsenal.
The account manager–one Pamela Qian, according to her name tag–wears her beige business suit neatly pressed, her black hair in a crisp flip, her talons polished a perfect pink.
We sit. She sifts through my documents, picking at them with her pink talons, then glares at me with startling suspicion.
“So. The Garden of Abracadabra? You’re the new superintendent, Ms. Teller?”
“Yes, ma’am, and very glad for the opportunity.”
She yanks opens a drawer, takes out a signature card, and shoves the card across the desk. “Fill that out, please, and let me see your driver’s license.”
I slide the signed card and my license over. She takes out a notary public’s ledger, verifies my signature, stamps the ledger, and shoves my license back.
With the tip of her pen, she also shoves the bank deposit bag at me. She shoves things around a lot, does Pamela Qian. A brusque gesture, half hostile, half fearful.
“You will need to endorse each check.” Her manicured hands tremble. “You will please remove the checks from the bag, Ms. Teller, thank you very much.”
“Be glad to.”
She springs to her feet and scrambles away, cowering against the tellers’ windows.
Gosh, is it my breath? Something I said? I unzip and upend the bag, and things slide out.
Esmeralda’s check floats down first, a snot-smeared Kleenex. Earthworms squirm from the next check, maggots from another. A tarantula with mandibles the size of paperclips skitters across the desk. One check drips a rusty liquid suspiciously like blood, another some kind of disgusting grease. Serious teeth snap along the side of one check, and a scorpion’s stinger strikes from another. One check crackles with yellow flames, another with blue flames, another with red, and each of them hot!
The check written by Tesla crackles with dangerous little sparks of electricity. Tesla, my beanpole friend! How could you?
I snatch my fingers away. What have my tenants done? I wave my hands over the checks in a fakirish kind of way, my confidence destroyed.
“Um, I am your new super,” I intone. “It is my sworn duty to endorse you and deposit you. So you better lose those stupid little spells RIGHT NOW.”
A maggot wriggles down from the desk and humps across the floor toward Pamela Qian.
She utters a horrified squeak.
“Okay.” I shake my finger at the checks. “Ah. Change NOW or I’ll charge whoever wrote you a late fee.”
The tarantula leaps over the computer keyboard and crawls toward a mommy pushing her toddler in a stroller.
“Maybe I’ll evict whoever wrote you! Think about that!”
The check with snapping teeth sprouts wings and flies at an elderly lady leaning on a walker, entangling itself in her wispy white hair. She shrieks, and a frowning security guard strides toward me, reaching for her holster.
Think, Abby, think! And then I’ve got a brainstorm, my confidence restored. Three words pop into my mind’s eye, inspired by the Too Cool Pizza boxes.
I shout, “PAY ABRACADABRA PAY!”
The vermin and disgusting fluids and flames and sparks and teeth disappear. The checks lie still and silent, obediently awaiting my endorsement.
You see? You cannot deal with bespelled rent checks by rational argument or appeals to reason.
I take the endorsed checks to an ashen teller. I wait while he whips each check through his check-whipping machine and tallies the monthly total, which he prints out on a slip and slides under his smeary Plexi-glas window-shield.
I fill out a deposit slip for a nudge over a hundred-seventy-five thousand dollars. A low sum, really, with so many longtime tenants protected by Berkeley rent control. But a position of responsibility, after all, serving as the superintendent of the Garden of Abracadabra.
Pamela Qian watches me, thin-lipped and wide-eyed.
“This will never happen again, Ms. Qian.”
“That’s what they all say.”
It’s good to have a vote of confidence from your banker.
Which check was my fave? The earthworms and the maggots are a toss-up, but there’s something about a tarantula with mandibles the size of paperclips that screams First Prize.
Just wait till I find out who wrote that check.
********
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