Conjure Man Steals Fairy Woman
The good guys have a debate
[Welcome back to Mad Art Project. This story takes place the day after Tim visits Donnie Ross. You remember — Donovan, Zara T, and Tim were sitting up over some ledge near Dunlap looking at the draft copy of Zara T’s zine about Jethra. Well, this is the evening after that afternoon, or almost 24 hours after As the World Ends. Having presented himself as an unimaginative, ice-for-blood bastard, Tim has uphill work convincing his young friends that he thinks Donnie Ross has stolen Jethra so he can get at her magic. But there we are. Lies are hard to maintain.
Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
I’d hoped to avoid it.
But as was bound to happen, the artist Zara T and I were arguing.
Let’s back up. Allow me to share a delightful bit of background with you. When I lost my last corporate job, one of the causes for my termination was listed as:
Virulent misogyny
in verbal communications with fellow team members.
You were starting to think I’m a nice person, weren’t you? Better disabuse yourself of that notion fast.
Nice wasn’t going to get me far toward finding Jethra. Only rage was going to do that. Rage at her for implicating me in her madness, and, worse, for putting herself in danger. I’m a wretched creature who should have been drowned at birth, but Jethra — Jethra was (is, I told myself, is) magnificent. And she wanted me to exist, to continue, to be. In her grotesque way, she’d been throwing me a lifeline all these years. I did realize that, now. But it wasn’t worth the risk. My life wasn’t worth hers. I was furious with her for prizing me so high and herself so low. Stupid, I thought over and over again, hoping she could hear me. Stupid.
Combined with rage at Jethra, I was motivated by profound anger with Donnie Ross, who had not only wasted my time but drowned my Triumph Spitfire, got me crosswise with the sheriff, and tried to ensorcel me. All the while keeping Jethra captive. The longer I knew him, the more I pictured a target between his eyebrows.
Anyhow, back to Zara T. As we looked at her zine together — in draft copy — and I shared my adventures at Donnie Ross’s house, I had to put up with her tolerance of, even squeaky enthusiasm for, her new notion that I was a closeted gay man.
Good god.
I did have to give her a little background. My attraction to Donnie Ross was real enough, but that’s because even the best spells can’t call fire with no tinder. I offered plenty of dry kindling to work with, believe you me.
Anyhow, I contended that Donnie Ross was a — what do they call them in the Bible? — a principality, maybe — something worse than a conjure man. A prince of the fairy folk. I argued that Jethra’s mad art project had stirred up some powerful magic, and he had nabbed her because he wanted in on it.
Zara T didn’t hold with any of that. She argued that Jethra’s work was feminist some-nonsense-or-other, and that if Donnie had Jethra held prisoner, the cause must be religious abuse.
That word again. Abuse. It’s meaningless. Worse than meaningless, it’s a sort of unanswerable grievance. And it’s most often a lie. You don’t set out to abuse anyone. You set out to love them — but never mind me.
I figured Donnie Ross might delude himself into thinking he was saving Jethra’s soul some way, but also that vampires and tax collectors and liberal busybodies might delude themselves into thinking they’re doing you some good, too. Even if Zara T was correct, Donnie’s self-delusions were irrelevant. I wanted the truth of the matter. And that truth was magic.
At that point we began to fight.
First, Zara T wouldn’t believe me.
Then she had a giggling fit. Me, a dour, bald-headed, pot-bellied little asshole, blabbing on about fairies.
When I finally convinced her I was serious, she told me I was a naive idiot.
“I cannot believe I’m having this conversation with a grown man,” and so on. And on. I let her rant.
Donovan weighed in on my side, explaining to an incredulous Zara T how these hills were full of fairies, the caves were crawling with hodags, and the Cherokee Nunnehi roamed the hollow hills.
“Even if that were true,” Zara T said, drawing her straight black eyebrows together and pulling her shoulders, best she could, away from me on one side and Donovan on the other, “even if that were true, nothing in Jethra’s art suggests anything but a political inspiration. Satire, surrealism, maybe even whimsy, but only as vehicles of an urgent political commitment.”
That was in Donovan’s truck. We bickered all the way from Dunlap to Orme and into my boardinghouse. We argued across the porch, up the carpeted stairs, and into my bed-sitting room, where we unpacked the dozen Krystals we’d picked up down in South Pittsburgh. While I went to the bathroom for the Pepto-Bismol, Zara took over my favorite chair and set to work in her sketchbook. Donovan sat on the landlady’s pink rug — probably bought back in the 1980s when she could still afford Laura Ashley — and worked through the remaining Krystals and fries.
It’s not that I disagree with all feminisms created at any time ever. (I once read Katelyn’s copy of Mary Daly and practically had an orgasm. Mary understood invective. And she hated trans women. She expressed her contempt, which I in no small part shared, with such delicious cruelty I used to look at my favorite passages and imagine a series of punishments and humiliations so eye-watering — but never mind me. I haven’t told you about Katelyn, anyway.)
I’m pro-choice — anti-natal, to be more specific; we humans are a wretched race and there should be fewer of us — and believe in the Equal Rights Amendment if it means women can get drafted for combat duty. That would stop their mewling about equal treatment, and cull their numbers, too. Fewer women, fewer brats. Put us all out of our misery.
I realize whiny nihilism isn’t much of a philosophical position. Yet here we are.
Still, you know, as much as I despise women in general and myself in particular, I infinitely prefer women to men — again including myself.
Fuck this myopia. It’s a waste of my time. Let’s think about other people.
Despite myself, I liked Zara T. Despite myself, I wondered what it would be like to have a daughter.
She sat in the La-Z-Boy I had crammed in the sitting room half of my apartment. I had a third of the upper story of crumbling, once-pink Victorian house. Leaky ceiling, chilly in winter, water-stained rugs — and an East view of the railroad tracks and the mountain beyond. Now Zara was sitting where I usually did, hands folded over the back of the recliner, moonlight tracing her white forearms. She had on a raggedy-looking black sweater with the sleeves pushed back. Her hands and arms, of course, were stained with ink. She looked like she was channeling Winona Rider circa 1989.
“Who?” Zara T asked when I mentioned it.
“Never mind,” I said. “It’s a compliment, if that helps.”
I sighed. I had only the one chair. I was sitting on the floor, my ankles crossed in front of me, hugging my knees. Donovan had finished off the food and was leaning on the wall near the other window, his arms folded over his chest.
“Look at it this way,” I went on. “Do you think Donnie Ross or his goons have the brains to understand your kind of politics, let alone make anything but the most primitive of objections? If they had a problem with her politics, Jethra would still be in jail. Or they’d have run her out of town, or gotten rid of her somehow.”
Donovan lifted his shoulders. He’d been pondering while Zara T and I argued.
“We don’t know that didn’t happen,” he said. “Maybe it did. Someone decided she was unsavory and thought they were doing the Lord’s work by bashing her on the head.”
I glanced over my shoulder. Donovan had been crying, but he wasn’t blubbering, or not much. He wiped his face with his forearm, smearing a little snot. I fished out my handkerchief and held it up to him.
“Thanks,” he said, bending for it. “I do have a bandana around here somewhere — ”
But he had lost it. Donovan sorted through his pockets, all the while crying for his mother. He wept without shame, but quietly — trying not to bother us too much with his sobs. To think this was the little boy I used to be so jealous of.
Zara T, nestled in the little hammock made by the folded-out La-Z-Boy, continued to look away from us out the window. I pushed myself to my feet and came over to her. When she didn’t look up, I touched her shoulder.
“Hey.”
Nothing.
“We shouldn’t quarrel,” I said. “It’s a distraction.”
Zara T still didn’t move. Looking at the moon, she asked me, “How can you call yourself her oldest friend when you despise everything she stood for?”
I smiled, but Zara T couldn’t see it. Now I really did like this girl — she, too, took Jethra seriously. And she’d never even met her, not in real life.
After a while I said, “Once, long ago, I used to crossdress.”
That got her attention. She looked over her shoulder, then turned all the way around, kneeling up away from the back of the seat.
“It’s got nothing to do with me now, of course. And I was married then.” I tried and failed to picture my first wife’s face. I had been in my mid-30s — still in the Air Force, or maybe the Reserve by that time. “And this girl happened upon me and somehow realized — who I was. And we started having an affair on that basis.” I tried to picture Katelyn’s face. I almost could, but she slid away.
“Anyhow, she kept trying to rescue me.” I sat on the arm of the chair. “She explained how I was trapped by the gender binary, oppressed by the patriarchy and so on, if only I could get rid of this narrow-minded wife I had I could be free — of course my wife wasn’t narrow-minded, or I never gave her a chance to be. She simply knew nothing about it.”
Donovan came away from the far wall and took my place on the floor, looking up at me like a child at story time.
“Anyhow, we wrangled it back and forth for maybe 18 months or two years.” For a second I could remember Katelyn after all. She had a tiny, triangular face and so much carroty red hair it made a cape for her when she knelt on the floor. “She finally broke with me when I convinced her that my analysis of our situation was not only the simplest but the only morally or ethically salient one.”
“What was that?” Donovan asked. His voice seemed to rumble across Zara’s light tones and mine.
My mouth quirked up. “Crossdresser cheats on wife.”
Donovan leaned back on his elbows. By now it was fully dark; moonlight touched the walls and our faces, leaving corners and features shadowed. After a while I realized he was looking at me with compassion.
As for Zara T, I didn’t want compassion from her and certainly didn’t get it. But she picked up the thread. I felt, rather than saw, her settle back in the chair. “And in this instance?” she asked. “What’s the analogy?”
I felt for the words and they came to me. “Conjure man steals fairy woman. Isn’t that what they always do?”
Silence again. A train whistled, two longs and a short, followed by a long again, telling any night wanderers it was crossing the tracks.
Something poked my shoulder. Zara T’s bony fingertip. “You realize, you just restated — ”
Suddenly I felt very tired. “I know, I know. But it’s not worth arguing now.”
Too late to give Zara T a ride back to Chattanooga, though I doubted the wisdom of keeping her here with the sheriff sniffing around. She and Donovan outvoted me, though. We gave her the bed — a big four-poster with a crushing weight of pink and lavender flowered quilts. Donovan spread out on the rug, and I crept onto my La-Z-Boy, glad to have it back. It now smelled like cherry blossom body spray from Bath & Body Works. I pulled a comforter over my head.
After a while I felt someone looking at me. I peered over the edge of the comforter.
“Something?”
“You’re Diotima?”
“You woke me up to ask the obvious? Yes.”
“Ah.”
“Jethra’s mistaken, you know,” I said when Zara T kept standing there. “She’s bleeding out her heart in mad art projects for someone who never existed.”
The moon had risen above the house. Now Zara T was only a shadow, soft rich dark against cool empty dark, smelling like sleep and cherry blossoms.
“Something else?” I asked.
“And yet you believe in fairies. You don’t believe in Diotima. You do believe in fairies.”
“It’s these recalcitrant Cumberland Plateau mindsets. Hard to understand if you’re not from around here.” I put my hand on the edge of the comforter. “Don’t fret over me, girl. Go on back to sleep.” I pulled the quilt over my head.
I didn’t hear her leave, but I felt the air swirl into her absence. After a while I heard Donovan stand up and follow her into the bedroom.