21
“Magic is Real,” Professor Bonwitch tells our class. “Those in the World of Magic have known this truth since the dawn of humanity. You know this, too, or you would not have applied to study at the Berkeley College of Magical Arts and Crafts, and we would not have accepted you.”
I lean forward on a teakwood bench, rapt at the words I’ve been longing to hear. Real Magic: no longer my shameful secret. No longer a part of me I need to suppress. Now I may embrace my true nature, celebrate my power. I don’t have to feel so alone in the quotidian world. Mama told me on her deathbed mastering my power is the key to my survival, but it’s more than that. It’s who I am. It’s me, Abby Teller.
I don’t take notes like the other students tapping on their laptops. I just listen, mesmerized by Bonwitch’s melodious voice.
“Throughout history, those in the World of Magic have been shunned or persecuted or exiled because of their power,” Bonwitch continues. “Often tortured and killed. Thanks to a more enlightened world, we can now teach what was once zealously confined to secret societies. But never doubt that prejudice and hostility toward us still exist today.”
Four teakwood benches, including the one where I sit, form a square on a patio in a garden courtyard. The courtyard is a labyrinth of paths and patios bordered by jungles of hydrangeas and dragon palms. Riverstone walks beneath high arched doorways lead in and out.
Surrounding the courtyard stands the college itself: turreted gothic buildings, the luminous dark brick draped with thickets of ivy and inset with mullioned windows. Above the rooftops of patinated copper rise ancient pines and eucalyptus, an arboreal shield for this, our inner sanctum of magic.
The honeyed sunlight of late afternoon beams down on us. A pitcher of iced tea stands on a teakwood table in the center of our square, along with bowls of lemon and lime wedges and turbinado sugar. Students crowd the benches–twenty-two of us, in all–and help ourselves to tea, quenching our thirst in the heat. I press an icy tumbler against my cheek and marvel. And listen.
“Now. Magic is a natural phenomenon subject to Fundamental Laws,” Bonwitch continues. “You will learn these laws so that you do not use your power angrily, fearfully, ignorantly, or unconsciously, but by precise application of proper procedures and your power. The heart is the gateway to Real Magic, but the mind is the guide. You follow?”
Isaac A.M. Bonwitch is a tiny ramrod of a man with an aura of huge authority. He dresses nattily, professorily, in olive-green cords and a vest, a tan cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and brown suede Birkenstocks over bare feet. He’s pulled his long, silver hair into a ponytail clipped in a brass barrette. His lean little freckled face glows with good health and his emerald-green eyes have a way of piercing everything he glances at. The bow of his mouth is punctuated by a meerschaum pipe, the carved bowl of which bears a tiny likeness of his own face. No pipe tobacco fumes foul the air but, every now and then, a puff of herbal-scented smoke floats out of the bowl and forms arabesques around his head.
Bonwitch sits, legs crossed, on a teakwood chair in the corner between my bench and the next. Bonwitch! Isaac Bonwitch! The cross-street at Dwight Way where the college stands is named Bonwitch Street in his honor. Decades ago, he was the first student at the University to take his doctoral degree, summa cum laud, in Magic. Real Magic.
“And so, make no mistake. If magic is a natural phenomenon, then magic is also a neutral phenomenon. Like electromagnetism or the movement of subatomic particles. Magic propels the way electricity or atomic power propel. And like electricity or atomic power, the qualitative action of magic is decided by the medium through which it flows. Questions?”
“When you say ‘medium,’ do you mean someone who speaks with the dead?” asks the stocky young man sitting beside me.
“No, the medium, my friend, is you.” Bonwitch takes his pipe from the grip of his teeth. “That said, let us begin. Each of you experienced an inciting incident that confirmed you possess power. Will each of you please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your life and your inciting incident. Who wants to go first?”
Eighteen-year-old Tina, fresh-faced and zaftig in a flowing floral shift, raises her hand and tells us how her older brother had battered her since she was three. One day he was chasing her in her own bedroom and she turned, enraged, and stood her ground. The brother staggered across the room, as if shoved by an invisible hand, and plunged into her clothes closet. The door slammed shut and stayed that way for three days, despite the efforts of Tina’s parents to free him. She was thirteen, at the time.
The stocky young man sitting beside me–Josh, in his late twenties–speaks next. His uncle had been molesting him since he was seven. One day Uncle Bob took him out to the garage behind the house like he did when he craved little Joshie, and Josh rebelled. Something invisible yanked Uncle Bob into his nineteen-eighty Impala sedan and pounded the door locks shut. Uncle Bob couldn’t escape the Impala for a whole week, surviving on a six-pack of beer he’d left in the backseat.
I shake my head, amazed and troubled. Among the dozen other students in their late teens or twenties, their life stories, their inciting incidents, are dreadfully alike. Child abuse, so much of it. Rage and sorrow, so much of that, too. And magic saved them. Magic changed everything. Magic changed their lives.
It didn’t matter if they had to keep their power a secret from the quotidian world.
Bonwitch raises an eyebrow at me.
Now a regal woman with a streak of white through her silky black hair holds up her hand and tells us–thankfully!–a different story.
Julianne, a corporate attorney on the verge of retiring after thirty stressful years of a high-profile career, found herself diagnosed with stage-three breast cancer. Rage and sorrow again, but this time directed at herself. At the life she’d lived, the choices she’d made. After she moved past those emotions, though, she embraced her passionate overwhelming desire to survive.
“I had plans for my retirement. I wanted to grow heirloom tomatoes. I thought about those tomatoes every waking moment.”
Julianne sought a second opinion before submitting to the ordeal of surgery and chemo. Her new doctor examined her and found no tumor. No metastasis. No nothing. The new doctor pronounced this a miracle. Julianne pronounced it her passion to grow heirloom tomatoes. Julianne says it was Real Magic. Now she’s eager to learn how to heal others with her power.
We all congratulate Julianne and wish her well.
The next half-dozen students, in their thirties and forties, are men and women working night jobs or odd jobs, taking sabbaticals from jobs they dislike or collecting unemployment. Their inciting incidents in midlife have changed their points of view, ended marriages, and estranged friends. And have led to this, the adventure of returning to college to study Real Magic. Two are nurses, one a security guard, another a bartender who boasts of using so much sex magic to seduce so many women, I have to wonder what he intends to do with his new schooling.
Bonwitch raises an eyebrow at me again and says to the bartender, “Thank you, Jigg. We are all here to learn.”
Time for me. I tell everyone my name and how, as a young teen, I summoned the fireflies. The serenity of that summer’s eve. My awareness of single-minded concentration. My love for my mother who–I’d suspected even then–was just beginning her long, slow journey into suffering and death.
A woman sitting opposite me laughs out loud. A bray of a laugh, mocking and condescending.
A beauty in her late twenties, she boasts perfectly tanned skin, a cascade of shiny hair, arrogant eyes, and a thin-lipped mouth set in a sneer. Tall and willowy, she shows off toned arms and legs in a bikini top and denim short shorts.
I’ve been known to wear the same getup, only to the beach, not to class. Our features are quite different–her hair’s straight, mine curly, her lips thin, mine curvy–but she’s like my twin. My evil twin.
“You find my story amusing?”
“Mommy Dearest named you Abby Teller? Man, I would never name my daughter after a kid who got murdered.”
“But I am Abby Teller.”
“The most famous kid in the World of Magic? I’m so sure. And fireflies? How stupid is that? Don’t you mean you caught some guy’s fly on fire?”
Bonwitch watches and listens and puffs on his pipe.
I wait till the hoots and jeers and disparaging comments of my fellow students die down.
“No, I was a late bloomer. At fourteen I was a bit too young for guys and their flies. My inciting incident was wonderful and inspiring. And the reason–one of the reasons–why I’m sitting here today. So who are you, surfer chick? Why don’t you tell us about your inciting incident?”
“I’m Jacqueline Nixx, but my friends and my enemies call me Jackal, and so can you.” She springs to her feet and stretches, treating us to a view of her skinny ribs. “I’ve got a sister. A little, little sister. Well. Sis used to be little. Now she’s a great big fatso, too bad. Back when she was little, Mommy and Daddy couldn’t get enough of l’il Sis. One Easter Sunday, they got Sis the cutest li’l Easter basket filled with the cutest li’l Easter bunnies. Live rabbit babies, right?”
I trade a look with Josh. Neither of us likes where this is going.
“One moment, Jackal,” Bonwitch interrupts. “I’d like to see what happened that day. Yonder, On.”
An amber beam shoots out of the sunlit pitcher of iced tea, forming a thick slice of lambent light that floats in the air before us.
Tina screams, Josh shouts, Jackal chuckles, Julianne stares, and the other students murmur among themselves.
Wow. I have to laugh. What kind of power does Bonwitch possess, anyway? He can summon the Yonder with a pitcher of iced tea? The pitcher amazes me, but the slice of light is no longer such a surprise. Yet what is that light?
“What is the Yonder, Professor Bonwitch?” I ask.
“Abby, the Yonder is the record of all acts of power—human, undead, and unhuman. Some believe the Yonder existed even before humanity came to possess consciousness. In ancient days, it took a gifted seer to summon the Yonder in a crystal ball, a basin of water, or torchlight. Others have summoned the Yonder in dreams or in trances. Our modern electricity makes summoning so much easier. So easy, in fact, that anyone with the slightest touch of power can summon the Yonder. Any source of light or a high vibration of energy will do. Computer screens work wonderfully, TVs and cell phones, too. Why, I’ve heard of a witch who spied on the sex magic of her philandering husband using a microwave oven.”
“Can you summon the Yonder to investigate acts of criminal power? Acts of supernatural evil?”
“Especially such acts.” Bonwitch turns toward the slice of light. “Summon Jacqueline Nixx. Go To Easter Sunday.”
A world pops up in the light, displaying the name and date of birth of Jacqueline Nixx.
Name and date give way to the cozy world of a suburban living room. A smiling man and woman perch on an Ikea couch watching a young pretty girl sitting cross-legged on a beige wall-to-wall carpet, love and parental pride shining on their faces.
The girl cradles a wicker basket in her lap. The basket is festive, a big pink bow on the handle and half a dozen baby bunnies curled up inside. The girl offers her finger, and a bunny sniffs, its little pink snout and white whiskers quivering. The girl laughs with delight.
An older girl stands off to the side. She scowls at the others, her face a dangerous mask of scorn.
“There we were,” Jackal says. “Mommy and Daddy fussing over l’il Sis, as usual. I couldn’t freakin’ take it anymore.”
The older girl twirls her thumbs, and the bunnies’ heads rotate in an odd way. She bounds across the room, rips the basket from the young girl’s hands and dumps the little dead animals in her lap.
The parents’ mouths fall open. The young girl screams, tears streaming down her face.
“Crunch! Their stupid little heads twisted right off their stupid little necks.” Jackal laughs and claps her hands. “Sis screamed and cried for days. It was fantastic.”
“Didn’t your parents punish you?” I ask quietly.
“Hell, no. Mommy and Daddy were afraid of me. Still are. Paying my tuition and all my bills, no questions asked.”
“You stupid, ugly, nasty bitch,” Julianne says.
Jackal shrugs. “Sticks and stones.”
“Why did you let this evil witch into our class?” Tina cries, turning to Bonwitch.
“Yeah, I’m paying a lot of tuition,” Josh says. “On my own.”
The bartender and one of the nurses exchange a smirk.
“Actually, I find rabbit stew quite tasty,” Jigg says, and the nurse chuckles in agreement. “I mean, they were just rabbits.”
Julianne exchanges a look with me. What kind of cretins are we in class with? “Right,” she says acidly. “And she was just the younger sister.”
A tearful thirty-something–another student who told her tale of a stepfather’s abuse and her long struggle with an eating disorder–slaps her laptop shut, stands, and stalks away.
“Sally Lee,” Bonwitch calls to her. “Please come back and join us. The class isn’t over.”
“Why should I? Why should I stay in a class with the likes of Jackal? Or any of you? Who are you people, anyway?”
Bonwitch turns to me. “Abby? Will you please tell Sally Lee why she should stay?”
I mull the question over, half-ready to walk out myself. “Because we’re here to learn Real Magic.” I look at Jackal, mocking me, and at Bonwitch, challenging me. “About the good and the evil, the beautiful and the ugly, the compassionate and the sadistic. Right, Professor?”
He puffs on his meerschaum pipe. The face on the bowl winks at me. “It wouldn’t be a very useful education, now would it?”
********
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