Initiated Read online

  She lay propped on one elbow, gazing down at my face, hand stroking my forehead. “Would you rather choose or be chosen?” she asked me gently. I wasn’t sure. Be chosen? “Good.” She smiled, satisfied. “I’d rather choose.” She placed one of her fingers on my third eye and tapped. “I choose you.”

  Soon, Isla and I were spending all our time together. Dashing through the pines on our way to Big Sur in her 1974 electric blue Alfa Romeo with custom-painted star hubcaps. She taught me how to drive a stick. The car was temperamental, with a sticky clutch and gas pedal so responsive just a nudge would send it throttling forward in a thick perfume of gasoline. She took me to the mineral hot springs at Esalen. We bathed in the starlight and held hands while young women massaged us on the midnight cliffs, the ocean sucking and slapping at the boulders below.

  Isla bought me a sapphire-blue acoustic guitar with electric hookups and I’d practice until my fingers were calloused and bloody. We’d write romantic songs about secret gardens and lovers trysts gone awry. Sometimes we’d spend days holed up in her room listening to music and drawing. Since completing her undergraduate degree at the Savannah College of Art, Isla had been obsessed with drawing sunflowers on thick, velvety paper stretching sometimes over twelve feet tall. She’d inscribe the flowers in tight, photorealistic precision, their petals trembling and gasping like sea anemones. At the center of their buds would always be these sad, veiny eyes. They were beautiful, and I wanted to like them, but they always creeped me out. She’d pin them to the wall and the flowers would watch us from a garden of horror and disappointment.

  When we weren’t writing our own songs or making art, we’d spend the afternoons listening to music and making love. Isla was a rebel in most ways, but she was conservative in bed. Innocent, almost childish and yielding. Very shy. When she looked at me, her eyes would be wide and hungry, like I was some bright and floating thing she couldn’t believe was actually there, as if I were the fairy and she the huntsman.

  One night, Isla took me to a party up near the Russian River in Sebastopol, a coastal town about an hour north of San Francisco. We drove down a single-lane road, our headlights glancing off the whirls of fog and silhouettes of black pine. We parked alongside the road and could hear the throb of trance music coming from a wooden house with a winding front porch strung with brightly colored Japanese lanterns. Isla clomped up the steps in her heavy boots and thrust open the door without knocking. A crowd of revelers sent up a cheer when they saw Isla’s face: now the party had truly begun.

  Inside, it was all wood walls and wood beams and stained glass lamps with lots of art collected from everywhere: brightly painted Balinese dragons hung above antique Berber rugs, geometric designs in cranberry, turmeric, and indigo. Everyone there, all genders, was long-haired and sleepy-eyed, draped in undyed linen blouses and fringed shawls, with brass rings tangled in their hair, skirts slung low to show off their yoga-toned, ringed belly buttons. No one around Isla ever seemed to have a job. Everyone was a traveler, having just come back from Spain, or Tokyo, or a trip through the Peruvian Amazon. The last time I’d left California was when I was twelve and I went on a camping trip to the Grand Canyon with my dad.

  “Here, try this,” Isla said, pulling me aside and spooning a generous dollop of honey into my mouth. Crammed with little bits of something mysterious, it tasted like it’d been scraped from the roots of an old, smelly tree.

  “What is it?” I asked, dubious. We hadn’t really even entered the room yet.

  “Just wait,” she cooed, stroking my face. “We’re going to have so much fun.” A flock of women swooped in, surrounding Isla, smiling in their big floppy hats and heavy beaded necklaces. With names like Luna and Lorelei, all of them dazzled her. I watched from the corner as they pulled her off into another room.

  The music continued in its psychedelic whirl. I began to feel a gnawing in my belly. Soon, everything was alive. The woods around the house, the plants, the crystals on the shelves of the library, all vibrating and active. I searched the house but Isla was nowhere to be found. When I asked the beautiful people where she was, they’d give me blissed out smiles, sometimes gesturing toward this or that door, then shrugging and turning away, my anxiety harshing their vibe. Eventually I found myself called outside by a towering ancient redwood. The tree stood just beyond the back deck, where there was a hot tub on one side and the fairy dark woods below. I heard a giggle and suddenly two childlike hands covered my eyes. “Where have you been?” I asked Isla. When I opened my mouth to speak, she slipped a round tablet that tasted like baby aspirin into my mouth.

  “Swallow,” she commanded, then, “Get in!” Joyous, she stripped off her street urchin attire and splashed naked into the aquamarine glow. We kissed in a froth bubbling up from the center of the earth. Water streaming off our shoulders, our legs entwined in a candy cane of white and pink and red. This was the world I’d been searching for. Everything was beautiful here, with this fairy creature next to me, stroking my face and telling me that we could live in the Summerland and never leave.

  “I know this place in Spain,” Isla said, “where you can live on the beach in caves. People have them all decked out with blankets and rugs and lanterns, and they eat fish straight from the ocean. We can go live there for a while, and then afterward I have a friend who is a count. He lives in a castle in Aix-en-Provence. That’s where all the most beautiful people in France live; we can go live there too.”

  I told her that I’d heard about medieval cemeteries in Italy where you could go on the night of the full moon and see blue will-o’-the-wisps escaping the marble vaults.

  “We’ll go there! We’ll stay in a villa and eat wine and melons!” she exclaimed.

  “At night we’ll prowl through the cemeteries in cloaks, our necks wreathed in garlic, calling for the aid of Aradia, Italian goddess of wildness and witches,” I agreed.

  Pulling herself dripping up onto the ledge, she grabbed a nearby towel. “I’m going to get us a glass of water,” she told me.

  I rested my arms on the edge of the tub, paddling my legs out behind me and asked her, “Will it come from a spring guarded by nymphs, surrounded in iris blossoms?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, cupping my face, reaching into her pocket for a white tab of paper and slipping it with her baby fingers beneath my tongue. “It’s going to be the most magical water there is; I’m going to get it for you.”

  I waited in the hot tub until eventually I felt that I would faint. Years later, that’s the way one of my uncles would die, drugged and passed out in a hot tub. I hauled myself onto the deck, disoriented and weak, barely able to tug my clothes across the friction of my still-wet body. Inside the house, a techno banshee was shrieking. I didn’t want to go in, but I needed to find Isla.

  The house seemed endless, fake somehow. It was trying to trick me. To hide her. I couldn’t find her. And I began to panic that she had left me there, that I’d never be able to get back home. The people around me were starting to come down. You could see it. Smiling no longer, their eyes were wide and black, their lips a straight line across their gaunt faces.

  I left the house and felt with my bare feet along the ladder leading down into the woods below. I followed the humming insects and the sighing of the pines. Soon I lost all sense of direction. The trees whipped and whirred like in those Vietnam movies when the helicopter lands in the jungle meadow. It was the Angel of Death. Finally. I knew it. My own personal fairy master, my Fata Morgana. I felt its darkness envelop me. And I felt, rather than saw, a thousand animals come, opossums and raccoons and centipedes. They ate away my flesh, my eyes, my brains, until all that was left was dry bones. I was nothing. I was dust.

  But somehow, even as dust, I woke in the morning.

  I rose from the earth covered in leaves and dirt, eyes circled in mascara, and heard a terrified screaming coming from the river. Cutting through the thicket of trees to the east, I passed along the icy banks as the river gurgled around my ankles. There,
I found a man and a woman in a canoe wearing puffy orange life vests, clearly abducting a child.

  “What are you doing with that baby?” I shouted at them.

  “He’s fine,” the woman said to me, annoyed as she struggled to keep grip of the howling toddler trying to squirm free of her arms and plunge headlong into the water.

  “Why’s he crying so much then?” I demanded.

  The woman scowled, impatient. “He’s afraid of the water.”

  The man, the child’s father I now presume, took one look at me and started paddling hard, trying to escape upriver as swiftly as possible.

  The abductors, I now understand, were the child’s parents. Looking back, I realize I must have seemed threatening to them; a wild night creature creeping out of the lonesome woods. What if I had plunged into the water and tried to grab the child? Fairies are known for taking children. That night I had crossed the River Styx, waded away from the ordinary realms of existence. I had become a fairy too. Like Isla. A monster. An amoral creature of Tir Na Nog, and as such, I was a threat to those who still lived in human reality. It’s not an unfamiliar story for the youths of America. For many of us, self-administered, drug-induced initiation ceremonies are the best we can manage as we fumble toward spiritual awakening, even when mentorship in these processes is what we need most of all. We look around and can’t find anyone we trust to help us; without elders to look to for guidance, it’s easy to get lost.

  Eventually I made my way back to the Banshee House. I stalked into the kitchen, barefoot, trembling, covered in dirt, only to find Isla giggling with Lorelei at the kitchen table as they nibbled their biscuits. “How’d you get all that mess in your hair?” Isla wondered at me, smiling sweetly. She hadn’t even noticed I’d been gone.

  I’m just going to come right out and say that Isla was a drug dealer. Haunted by the ghost of her mother, an addict with a constant hunger for drugs, Isla grew up to become the supplier. She could feed her mother’s need, and everyone else’s. But Isla had a code about dealing. She refused to touch the drugs that had so incapacitated her mother: the barbiturates, the speed, the opiates. She would only deal in “nice, sweet, friendly drugs.” She told me, “I always want to do it on the up and up, and be a really good helpful drug dealer that just supplies people with things that are beneficial.” Ecstasy and acid, sometimes mushrooms. Though the latter didn’t make her any money, she believed in the benefit of distributing the “little teachers” to the people. With the acid, she mixed the potion herself in her darkroom. She called it “laying acid” as if she were laying eggs. The acid was laid in books, like the one the High Priestess of the tarot holds containing the knowledge of good and evil, heaven and hell.

  Isla would tell me she was blessed because she made a lot of money and didn’t have to work, but in my opinion, she worked constantly. There were always people hanging around, pretending to be there for friendly reasons, when really they were coming to score. No one could state what they wanted, get it, and leave. There had to be this whole big song and dance about it. We’d try to record a song and the phone would ring off the hook. We’d try to go away and we’d constantly have to cancel our plans because of some shipment or another. Our lives were constantly interrupted.

  We’d have dinner parties. Isla would enjoy them and insist on inviting everyone she knew. But I’d end up slaving away in the kitchen sprinkling our dinner with gray finishing salt gathered from the marshes of some medieval town in the Loire Valley, only to bring it down and find her making out with one of the random assortment of her model-type friends.

  We fought because I wanted to leave for Europe, land of beauty and romance, of vampire theaters and ballet slippers and cobblestones, where tract homes and junk mail could never reach me. I’d been saving up to go for years, money scraped off the sticky floors of sex clubs; I felt like I earned the money in sweat and humility. But being with Isla, the money flowed from my bank account. She always told me not to worry about it. She would pay me back. It upset her that I might leave for Europe without her and if I mentioned it she’d give me the silent treatment for days. There wasn’t enough funding for the arts in the U.S., I lamented. But why did I need government funding when I had her to support me? she’d complain. Thing was, I didn’t trust her to support me. She was capricious. She’d offer to pay for something one day, then forget she’d ever mentioned it the next. To ask again made me feel greedy. Besides, if she did get me something fancy, she’d be likely to hold it over me if I was ever angry at her and say, “But I bought you this or that or the other thing,” how dare I be mad at her? Even if she was making out with someone else. Even if she grabbed my dinner from my hands or left me on the side of the road because she saw me talking with some other woman.

  Most of our fights circled around three themes: (a) the imbalanced power dynamics in our relationship, (b) our vastly disparate levels of willingness to let ourselves get completely out of our minds on drugs (she loved the idea; I was terrified), and (c) faith in the benevolent attitude of the Universe. Regarding the latter, she had absolute faith that the Universe had her back, which is probably what made her magic so strong. I, on the other hand, was skeptical that the Universe even liked me, or wasn’t on some perpetual trip to teach me a lesson, which is probably why my magic was volatile and often terrifying.

  Isla loved to jet through the city on her Harley roadster, her pride and joy. She’d dart in and out of San Francisco’s ectoplasmic fog, zooming around corners into the blank white void with me clinging to her back, face scrunched between her shoulder blades, praying to every god I knew of but feeling the wings of the Angel of Death vibrating in the engine roar. She was pure will, and she didn’t question it. Isla wasn’t afraid of dying.

  Still, she did have her fears. Isla had a morbid fear of ugliness or ordinariness. She couldn’t handle poverty or suffering. One time we were walking through the Tenderloin district and she clutched my arm as a toothless homeless man came up to us and growled. Isla yelped. “Run, Amanda,” she called at me over her shoulder. “Calm down,” I told her as I walked behind; the man was clearly strung out, would probably die on those streets, even though he ran after her, laughing. “You’re just making it worse,” I told her. Isla’s impulse was to run away. To return to her fairy lair with the incense smoke and silk hammocks.

  Fat, too, was a moral failure. Isla had issues not only about controlling her own food but also the food of her friends. As everyone knows, fairies and food have a special relationship. She had a sweet tooth and loved to eat candy and ice cream and pastries galore, but if she found you eating ice cream she’d be just as likely to rip it from your hand and throw it out the window as she would to have a bite of it. If you weren’t up to her standards of beauty and civility (she loathed coarse behavior), you’d soon be out the window with the ice cream, a sticky mess melting on the sidewalk.

  Because of her allegiance to beauty, I had more freedom in the world than she did. I could go to places where she couldn’t, ugly places. Places with metal and machines and rats in the gutter. Places like New York City. She always said she would never go there. That she hated to even set foot inside it, she found it so unaesthetic and grueling. And so in our most violent fights when I felt the most afraid of her, I told myself that if I ever needed to hide, I could move to Manhattan.

  When Isla and I got together, I was working at a strip club just off Market Street called the Chez Parée. After our escapade at the Russian River, Isla became more and more agitated every time I went to work. “You don’t have to do this job,” she’d tell me. “I’m going to take care of you.” But her promises meant little. I couldn’t even trust her not to leave me by the side of the road if we had a fight. She’d done it more than once. Finally, after a series of particularly grueling arguments, she demanded I quit, and I gave in.

  Together, we went to the Chez Parée. I went backstage to collect my costumes from my locker. “Are you quitting?” the women backstage asked me. I told them that I’
d met this amazing pixie girl who happened to be rich and that we’d fallen in love and that we were going to go live in castles in France and caves in Spain and that in a few weeks we were going to Burning Man. The girls continued putting on their mascara. Mandi, who would always admonish me to “stop making that face!” while putting on my liquid eyeliner, smoldered jealously, deliciously, in the corner.

  Isla burst into the room. “What are you doing, Amanda?” She was manic. Being in this tawdry place upset her. She didn’t like all the men out front sulking in their plastic chairs, or the girls in the back room smearing body makeup on their razor burn. “Come on!” she shouted, ambling toward me with her strange bowlegged walk. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I’m almost done,” I said, pulling the last remaining G-strings and heels out of my locker.

  “You don’t need that stuff!” she exclaimed, her face growing red. She started grabbing things from my hands. “What is this?” She held up a black sheer negligee with fringe around the hem. “You don’t need this! This isn’t even long enough to cover your butt. You don’t need this anymore. Here!” She shoved the negligee into the hands of Marmalade, a quiet girl who’d just started stripping.

  “I love it,” Marmalade said, proudly holding the garment up to her chest.

  I didn’t know what to do. “You can’t just give away my stuff,” I said in a low voice.

  “Why not!” Isla yelled. “I’m going to be paying for everything for you, taking you to Europe, wining and dining you, and you can’t even share these pieces of trash!”