I met her when I was just about to turn eighteen. She was one of those women who just absolutely light up a room for no apparent reason– the mega-watt smile beaming from a lightbulb that for all other intents and purposes seemed broken and cold.
She was ugly by no standards, no, I couldn’t call her that. She had long dark hair, huge grey eyes, long, slender limbs and torso, shapely neck.
But it was almost as if some higher power had thrown everything just vaguely on the edge of elegant and graceful in a woman into a blender and came out with a body which was irrefutably average.
There was nothing extraordinary about her, other than that brilliant, perfect, white smile.
She wore grey tailored skirts and wool cardigans over dark blouses a lot of the time, tall black stilettos with red soles, her hair– darker than the patent leather of the tops of her shoes– up in a bun, a ringlet or two escaping.
Red lipstick always. Perfect skin. A hundred per cent average Chicago woman, I tell you.
They all start out like that, at least: but then they get old, fat, depressed, lonely; their hair greys, their skin wrinkles, age spots make an appearance, their toenails curl with fungus.
But twenty years after I had first met her, Alita was the same. Same smile for me every morning as we waited in the elevator to leave the apartment building we both lived in as we were on our separate ways to work at precisely 6:15 a.m., same brown paper bag lunch, same pair of two-and-a-half karat-diamond stud earrings.
She had no wrinkles, just one freckle– a beauty mark just to the left of her nose– no spider veins, no sagging, nothing to indicate she was a day over eighteen herself.
I was nearing forty. I had an irrational, blind hatred of this paragon of perfection.
As for me? I was still the same tall, lanky guy, dark eyes and light hair. Maybe a few wrinkles from smoking, maybe a few brown spots from the sun, but I was nowhere near as youthful as she. I worked out because it was part of my job– a fourth-dan karate instructor who isn’t in shape is no longer employed, or worse, is in hospital.
Yet I had never been able to puzzle out her secret. Was she a model, just wearing the latest makeup? A sorceress, frozen in time? A fairy? Fate herself only knew.
The brilliance about my job, I thought about two hours later as one of my assistant instructors kicked me in the jaw, was I could beat people up and not feel sorry about it. In retaliation I threw him across the room in two quick and well-executed moves– a combination I didn’t often use in sparring but was quite proficient at.
He groaned, and stood up, wavering slightly. My jaw throbbed. I thought of Alita again and was suddenly, irrationally, furious.
I had to know.
Twenty years of wondering will do that to a guy.
What was her secret?
All I knew was I had half a pack of Wides in my jacket pocket, my jaw would throb like a bitch for about a week and a half and then be fine, and my now former assistant would experience an even more hideous pain in about ten minutes if I didn’t take him to the emergency room. Luckily we didn’t have any more classes to teach that day; we had been working out following a class of blue belts, and suddenly he just fucking roundhouses me. For no reason.
He apologized in my car on the way to the hospital, sullenly. I asked him what the hell was eating his guts, and he told me, eyes nearly crossed from pain, that he’d always disliked me. I blinked a little and asked him if we had not worked together and studied together for the last thirteen years, and he groaned again. I rushed him into the ICU, just barely remembering to put my aging Volkswagen Beetle into park and take the key with me.
He would live. After I heard those words, I promptly left.
I drove to the supermarket, bought a bottle of Arizona iced tea and a string cheese stick, left the car in the parking lot, and got on the commuter train into the city.
I was going to visit my uncle the wizard.
You see, he performs magic. Or at least, according to most, he thinks he does. He has a whole variety of “magic wands” kept in a gun safe in his garage, ranging from a Vic Firth drumstick signed by Keith Moon himself to a luridly purple plastic vibrator. Most of his family considered it a relatively harmless oddity that he liked to scry the future in a blue ceramic bowl full of water collected from the pond behind his house at the full moon, but I knew better.
Uncle Leopold, funny old-man’s bow tie and all, was both a professor of mathematics and logic at the University of Chicago and a genuine enchanter, sometimes.
He did not work spells in the way of, say, Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice– it wasn’t about mops and brooms, but about asking the threads of Fate to tangle in a certain way in the future. Magic could never be worked for him on present or past. The further ahead in time you worked it, the stronger it would be.
So I had to ask him. Who had frozen Alita, if that was what kept her young, and why?
When I got to his duplex in the older part of Greektown, he wasn’t home. But I knew where he kept his spare key, so I let myself in, put it back where it belonged, and put the kettle on for tea.
Just as it whistled he materialized atop the bar stool directly to my left.
“Ah, good, Caine, you’ve come,” he chirped, not at all surprised. He was never surprised. It is impossible to put one over on somebody whose stock in trade is the probability of the future. He’d made a fortune on Wall Street in his youth.
“Alita?” I asked, knowing he’d know the answer.
“She’s nothing you want to mess with, pal,” he said regretfully, taking down his favourite mug and another, turning off the gas burner under the teapot, and setting in the tea bags I’d laid out on the saucers.
“What–who is she?” I queried.
“She is a memory created by your future self, somebody you’ll meet for real in about three days,” he replied.
I was only a little confused. How could I have known a memory of somebody I didn’t know yet for half my life? It made no sense, in any temporal, spatial, or rational fashion.
“You have it, my boy, the gift,” he chuckled.
He’d been telling me that all my life.
He’d been trying to get me to alter future probability all my life, too. Never managed it.
I never made it frost in the summertime, never made beautiful strangers fall in love with me and come home for a wild night in my bed, never made the grad school who’d denied my application reconsider me with a subtle twist of magic.
I didn’t know if I really could or not, mainly because I refused to use it.
Why?
I didn’t want to be like Uncle Leopold, dependent on his manipulation of probability for everything from arriving home at the perfect time for tea to being in the right place at the right time to adopt the prefect Welsh corgi, who was currently snoozing under my chair.
“Oh no, my boy. I never said you were like me, not one of those times,” he cackled, hopping off his barstool in a surprisingly spry manner for a tiny little seventy-year-old math professor.
“Huh?” was the best I could come up with.
“Your magic works very differently from my own– in fact, it might be said that one’s magic is unique to them, almost like a thumbprint. No two enchanters alive ever have the same powers, but there is always another with those powers directly opposite to you… this is called the Law of Negation, do you hear me, boy?” Leopold lectured, slurping his tea as he trotted down the cellar steps at an alarming rate, Caine following behind him, ready in case his elderly relative took a tumble.
“The ways in which we work magic are completely unique to us, though sometimes the results may be the same. You, my boy, we have to test, but I could only do it if you came to me wanting to know about something magical, of your own free will,” he said.
I sighed. Damn that woman. Memory. Whatever.
Damn her and her perfect legs. Double damn. I thought wildly, hopelessly, about having to mop my kitchen floor, and then straightened my head around. Now was not the time to think about arbitrary chores which could be done later.
My uncle was going to make me do magic, probably. I had no idea if this was good or very, very bad.
I cast my mind about for anything comforting, and finally settled on the black Gretsch hollowbody I religiously stopped by the music store on the corner down from my apartment building to play once a week. Out of respect for me, the owner hadn’t sold it in five years. The price tag, about eight hundred dollars, was still a little steep for me, but by putting away ten bucks every here and there I thought I’d about managed enough to buy it. If I lived off green vegetables and Top Ramen for a month, and maybe got a couple new students in, I could get a decent amp as well. Maybe the one I favoured in the store.
We rambled through the tunnels connecting his cellar to those of the neighbouring duplexes left over from the Prohibition (and the original reason why our family had never sold the place– there was a massive stash of delectable bathtub gin down in the very farthest corner) until we came to a very dusty wooden door. He fumbled about in his pocket for an equally aged-looking tarnished brass key. He fit it into the lock and sighed.
“Come here,”
Without conscious thought, I obeyed. No! Bad Caine! Bad! Don’t follow the lemmings! I mentally punched myself.
it didn’t help. I turned the key. The door opened on yet another tunnel, which I was unceremoniously shoved down by my uncle, who was a foot shorter and about a hundred pounds lighter than me. The man had the strength of an ox, I marveled, then remembered his probability magic.
Double damn. I landed in a slumped-over heap in, of all things, a basin of oil.
“We have to baptize you, first thing, or else the forces of Darkness will get ahold of you,” he chirped, chanting in Latin to the Holy Ghost over me.
I blinked. Blinked again. Blinked rapidly when he splashed the oil, which was olive and a bit musty, in my face.
I felt a strange tingly feeling pass over me.
“You’re all set to go, now,” he chirruped again, like an obscenely happy little cricket.
“What next, Uncle Leopold?” I asked wearily.
In answer he shoved a flashlight into my hand, which promptly slipped and fell to the floor with a slightly wet plop because I was– big surprise here– still dripping with oil.
“Just so long as you don’t light me on fire,” I grumbled, following his small form into the gloom further along in the large, square room, back from the oil font, which I could see in the light from the other flashlight was made of a shiny yellow metal– brass to match the key.
Or maybe gold? But gold didn’t tarnish… I banished the thought from my mind as we stopped before a rack of items. He started passing me things from a guitar strap to an antique ski pole to a very fancy felt fedora which I handled gingerly, trying not to get oil on such a quality hat.
“Hmm….” he muttered, digging through layers of things on the rack. He came up, eventually, with a pocket watch. He handed that to me as well, and I felt another tingle.
“That ‘un’s yours. Now you have to leave something to replace your talisman,” he instructed me. Without a second thought I took off my own diver’s watch and handed it to him. Time given for time taken.
I just wanted to find out about Alita, not be bathed in oil as protection against the boogeyman and swap out my timepiece, for Christ’s sake!
“Patience,” he cautioned.
Double damn, again. He knew me too well, my uncle Leopold. My father’s older brother by two years, he had taken me and my sister in when our parents died in a freak electrical accident– a power line had fallen on their car on a road trip they had taken through Arizona for their second honeymoon, turning them instantly to ash.
My sister calls all this magic nonsense, yet she’s always been able to make it snow by wishing for it, or freeze over the duck pond in July for an afternoon of skating….
I was the only one in our little group who had yet to do something unusual.
I only hoped it wouldn’t be something ridiculous. I had a ludicrous second where I imagined myself capable of turning my enemies into rubber ducks. Or worse, reusable condoms. I almost laughed aloud at that.
My uncle had stopped in the back of the room. I stopped too.
We gazed up at a vaulted ceiling painted with the night sky. I could barely make out Orion’s belt by the light of the electric torch, which was ironic.
“You’re going to meditate here until you figure out what you can do,” he said, then he and the light vanished. Great. Alone in the dark. In the cellar. With the cockroaches. And stuff.
I wondered briefly about vampires. Then proceeded to plonk down on the floor in a nice napping position…. and fall soundly asleep. Hey, it was dark. So much for fucking meditation.
Must not think. About. Her.
Every time I did think of her, I had immediately banished her from my mind, for the past twenty years, I realized as soon as I awoke.
Was that important or useful? I didn’t know.
I sat up and stretched out slowly, like a cat. I did a few quick warmups to limber up my cramped muscles (sleeping on a stone cellar floor isn’t the best thing for your back) and walked around a bit, stumbling over old trunks, furniture, garbage, and even a wooden hat stand.
I still didn’t know my power. But I was pissed. I was still oily, had no light, and was stuck in the most prodigious basement in Chicago. Lucky I didn’t have to teach on the weekends.
If I had three things in all the world right now, I most wanted a dill pickle, salted, a light, and a cigarette. I mentally punched myself again. I had a lighter in the breast pocket of my jacket. I fished it out, lit one of my remaining Wides, and took a look around the space it appeared I’d be getting to know pretty well here. I realized then that my whole hand was on fire.
Wait.
My hand was on fire!!!!!!
I ran around for a second trying to put it out in an old curtain before realizing, amidst the fumes of singed ancient damask, that it did not hurt.
Okay, maybe this had something to do with my magic. I tried to light up a finger on my opposite hand. My fuck you finger, naturally. It lit.
I whooped.
I lit the end of my nose. I put out the hand with the lighter in it. I put out my nose. I lit up my whole left arm to use as a torch out, and wondered if this had anything to do with the oil or if it was just my latent oddity finally peeking through. I wondered how my sister had figured out her frost, then smirked. Fire and ice.
Belinda was unusual in many ways, but the ice was probably the least of them. An ER surgeon with a latex fetish (do NOT ask how or why I know this, only keep in mind it was very traumatizing to discover) and a husband who was originally from Burkina Faso but had become naturalized, she had many quirks, running the gamut from being afraid of squirrels to not liking to wear other people’s coats even if freezing cold and they offered.
I suppose most brothers think their sisters are strange, but mine probably takes the cake. Though, as I said, an ER surgeon, she consistently dyed her hair unnatural colours. Purple. Blue. Bright canary yellow. She drove a Harley-Davidson, though her son was only a year old. He rode in a baby carrier on her back, or his father took him in his sensible middle-class black Jetta.
I found the fedora from earlier, and clapped it on my head, which was rather cold. I tingled again. Pocket-watch was securely clipped in my pocket. Head was hatted. Hand was alight. I looked for the exit, all boxes ticked. The only things I needed now, having smoked and found a light, were a damn pickle and… oh, a pair of dry shoes. That would be nice.
I carefully searched my pockets for something to give up for the fedora and came up with a jay feather I’d found a few days ago. I laid it on the table of talismans, and the tingly feeling approved.
Filed under: fiction, verbiage
