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  She pulled my clothes from my arms and began handing them out in a festival of generosity. “Here!” She handed Mandi, the girl who hated my makeup face, my most expensive dress.

  Isla had outsmarted me. I couldn’t very well insist on keeping my clothes after I’d just bragged to everyone about how my girlfriend was going to take care of me in the most extravagant way. The trouble was, without clothes, I couldn’t work, even if I wanted to. Those clothes were expensive; it took me a long time to build up that wardrobe. Now I was completely dependent on Isla’s caprice, which, it seemed, was exactly what she wanted.

  Not long after Isla threw away my clothes, we went to Burning Man, where clothes weren’t necessary. When I was young, my mother would take me to the Burning of Old Man Gloom, a city bonfire San Luis Obispo held each fall. People would stand around in the autumnal smoke, sipping hot cider out of Styrofoam cups, scribbling their worries down on bits of paper, then tossing them crumpled into the flames. At the center of the pyre was “Old Man Gloom,” stuffed with repossession papers, biopsy results, divorce forms, and delinquent notifications. Flames would lick up the Old Man’s legs, eating his center, devouring his jeans, his flannel shirt. People would stand around joyfully watching all their worries disappear in a catharsis of flames.

  It’s a tradition that goes back millennia. Julius Caesar reported, erroneously, that the druids stuffed their wicker men with human sacrifices before they lit them. In India, they burn an effigy of the demon Ravenna. In Latin America, a puppet of Judas is paraded through towns, then torched. The desire to destroy “The Man,” the betrayer, monster, and troublemaker, to light him on fire and make him disappear, is one that cannot be repressed in our species. Creating effigies and burning them is a magical act: taking a symbol, charging it with emotion and meaning, then manipulating it by burning it, dancing ’round it, decorating it, bathing it in milk or water or wine, piercing it with pins, or venerating it on an altar. We can’t help but do it. It’s not enough just to know that everything changes and that everything ends; we want to see the old man burn; we want to make it happen. Even when we know he’ll just reappear again next year and that our worries will never really go away.

  Black Rock City was already in full swing by the time we pitched our tents. The place was set up in a series of concentric circles around the central “plaza” where the effigy was being built, a fifty-foot-tall man made out of wood that they were going to set on fire on the final day of the festival. Dream Circus had been tasked with building a three-story castle around which we would cavort in a five-hundred-person-strong performance of The Seven Deadly Sins.

  By the time we arrived, the scaffolding for the castle had already been erected out of plywood and swaddled in chicken wire. At a nearby hot springs, we spent the day scooping mud with buckets into the back of a pickup truck. We took the mud back to the castle and slapped it onto the wire mesh like drywall until the whole thing was caked, covered completely. As the mud dried over the next few days, it became pale and cracked so that eventually it looked like the structure had emerged as a natural form from the dry lake bed.

  Once we’d erected the castle, we began rehearsing. It was too hot to rehearse in the middle of the day, so we spent the hottest hours sleeping and lounging under makeshift yurts and awnings, drinking chai and sharing sourdough pancakes with lentils and giving each other tarot readings and massages. All afternoon we were serenaded by the folks in the next tent practicing their accordion. Sand storms kicked up around us, swirling little djinns, mixing with the scent of roast cumin, cinnamon tea, and gasoline from trailer exhaust pipes. Motors were everywhere. People zipping around on motorcycles and motor skateboards and Jeeps. I even saw someone who’d motorized a sofa. Three people reclined on it, kicking up dust on the barren desert plain, using their remote control to avoid the stoned pedestrians. A lawless temporary autonomous zone, the entire scene was Mad Max meets hippie dream village.

  One afternoon, rehearsal got postponed until the next day and so I was hanging out under the Dream Circus awning, naked for whatever reason, when I heard the trumpeting blast of Isla’s Harley. I rose from my beanbag chair and walked out, shading my eyes from the desert glare.

  A Tasmanian devil trailing a white streak of dust cut across the central medina, Isla saw me from about twenty yards away and stopped. Her mouth gaping, she brushed the back of her wrist across her eyes. “Get on!” She jerked her chin toward the back of her motorbike.

  “I can’t,” I laughed.

  Isla was stricken, baffled. “Why not?”

  “Because there’s a girl on your bike already.”

  The girl on the back of the bike slapped Isla on the head. Hopping off, she growled, “I’ll walk, thanks.”

  I climbed on and off we shot, to tour the gallery of ice sculptures: angels slowly dripping their disappearance into the coming twilight.

  The next night at the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, the players contorted themselves through meshless tennis rackets while Isla plied me with drugs. Acid and ecstasy and mushrooms and mescaline. Later, I was a crumpled mess in our tent, terrorized by the endless motors outside, pleading with her. “I’m afraid I’m going to die. Am I going to die?” I kept asking her, gripping her skinny little arms.

  “Don’t worry,” she told me, hushing and soothing. She shared with me her trick: “Don’t think of anything bad. If you don’t think of anything bad, nothing bad can happen. Try to only think of nice things. Do you want me to sing to you?” She started to sing, but I couldn’t do like she did. We both knew bad things happened, but only she had the will to always pretend that they didn’t.

  The next night, I was still coming down during my performance with Dream Circus. Our chariots rode in endless circles, drawing a procession of hundreds of people performing Bacchanalian orgies, people decked in wings and animal masks and feathers and beads, painted in glitter; eyes lined in kohl; arms circled in gold bracelets; performers swinging on trapeze from the burning castle or riding around it on unicycles. Thousands of people cheered as the castle went down in flames, followed by the wooden man himself, until it seemed that everything was an apocalyptic blaze of destruction.

  At Burning Man, the whole point seemed to be, simply, “spectacle,” a spectacle of destruction for the teenage spirits of America. One could imagine some outraged parent stampeding into our civilization, demanding, “What is the meaning of all this?!” And the rebel children responding, “There is no meaning, Dad. You just don’t get it.” Except, in Isla’s case, no parents would ever barge in, because her mother was dead and her dad was, in her own words, “just some toothless hick farmer,” whom she barely knew. And who were the parents of our civilization? Clinton was president then. My gay uncles had named their convertible after Monica Lewinsky.

  On the playa that night, watching the last flaming two-by-fours collapse onto the sand, I felt like the burning man was a symbol for the entire Western world. Capitalist patriarchy likes to build things just to watch them fall. We extract resources and use them to build spectacular toys and then destroy them in a nihilistic bonfire. The burning of the man was cathartic, and an ancient custom, but there seemed to be a hopelessness or a despair about it. Like our civilization is wild and out of control and we might as well just let go and enjoy it because there was nothing real, no parent, no leader to save us. The planet is going to go down in flames; we might as well dance around the fire.

  Europe, finally. Isla brought the Dream Circus clan to Scotland to perform street theater at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Our decision to go on the trip was last minute, and so, for the first few days, despite Isla’s wealth, we couldn’t find anywhere to stay. The city was packed with tourists. Our first night, we slept in a graveyard, not so different from the ancient Italian ones we’d envisioned in the hot tub at the Russian River. Stone obelisks and mourning angels, aged marble crypts streaked with time and rain. I bedded down in a circle of Celtic crosses half covered in moss. All night long I was tortured out o
f sleep by strange spirits: orange biting gnats and angry bulls. But Isla was tortured worse; the fairies of the Old World were outraged by this New World fairy intruder.

  By the time a few of her friends from London arrived the next afternoon, Isla was exhausted and outraged. Jessica of the orange dreads appeared—Isla’s partner in crime—and Angelique, who dressed in bloomers and bonnets like Raggedy Ann and had just spent the summer busking around Europe, dancing like a marionette on top of a makeshift music box. Angelique’s father had rented us a big dorm room at the university, and so no more cemetery nights sleeping in the rain for us.

  That night, Isla, Jessica, and I went prowling the streets. We found an old church, its stones black with soot and time, stained glass shimmering in its Gothic arched windows. Inside was silent and empty. Isla and Jessica were walking on the pews, rummaging through the sacristy looking for treasure. I felt anxious watching them. “We shouldn’t be doing this,” I protested. “What if we get caught? What if we get thrown in a Scottish jail?”

  “C’mon, Amanda. Churches are bad,” Isla said, trying to soothe me. “You know how much suffering they’ve caused the world?”

  Jessica, who was lighting matches from the altar table and wafting the smoke through the air, added, “I bet they burnt witches like you right outside their front door not even that long ago. They probably got the money to build this thing by robbing brown people in some South Sea colony.”

  They had a point. But I couldn’t watch. I went outside and sat on the front steps. A few minutes later they came out, Isla with a pewter candle holder and Jessica with a red glass bauble, both of which they soon grew tired of and left on a stone wall abutting a tea shop.

  My Faery Queen was an outlaw. “We shouldn’t have to obey laws we didn’t write,” Isla would say. We shouldn’t have to obey rules written by old white men who only created them in order to preserve their wealth and power. At one point it was legal to enslave people; legal to rip a Native American child from her mother’s arms; legal to beat your wife. At the time Isla raided the church, it would have been illegal for us to get married. From Isla’s perspective, fairies didn’t have to follow human laws. The laws weren’t written for our benefit; they were created to protect the rights of the oligarchic few. Because which laws, throughout human history, were ever written by the vulnerable? By the outsiders, by the enslaved, by the witches, the women, the people with disabilities, the mentally ill, by the poor? None. Not ever.

  To exist outside the Law was, for Isla, a rejection of the evil hypocrisy of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. I wanted to exist outside of the Law, too, but I also knew that while we rejected the Law, it hadn’t rejected us. We still lived on its land; we were still its property. This trope of the outlaw ran through American culture, a deep red vein throbbing through its white puritanical marble. The outlaw is the one who stands outside the corral of civility. The one who is wild and free. Maverick cops and mafia bosses and fighter pilots and wily cowboys like Jesse James. Even intellectual culture has its outlaws, Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs, Jean Genet, all of whose vulvas are conspicuously absent. I recognized the trope of the outlaw in Isla, but when women are outlaws in our culture, they’re always punished for it. Thelma and Louise, Joan of Arc. The narrative balance isn’t set to rights again unless the woman ends up punished for her hubris (The Scarlet Letter) or submitting to a man (The Taming of the Shrew).

  For a long time, I saw the witch as a kind of outlaw. She stands outside the church; she stands outside patriarchal authority. But though the witch is an outlaw and outsider, I don’t see her as a criminal. Crowley’s law was, “Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law. Love under will.” Witches of the twentieth century added, “Do as you will, but cause no harm.” Fuck who you want, take the drugs you want, wear what you want, live how you like, but do your best not to hurt anyone. I thought of a priest coming to his church, finding things missing, and feeling violated and sad. Even if I didn’t agree with the church in principle, I didn’t want to cause harm. Isla’s law was rebellion, rebellion against the Law of the Father. She stood on the cliff, her back turned against his world in disgust.

  Chariot races and torches burning. The physical theater company Chaos Troupe performed Albert Camus’s Caligula, wearing simple black jeans and shirts, their faces and hands luminous in the dark theater. Without a set, or any spectacle at all, they conjured Rome to the stage with its columns and villas and amphitheaters. The themes of the play were clear: decadence and selfishness, an oligarch’s willingness to let the whole world burn for his fleeting pleasure. The show was tight. Rigorous. I doubted very much that any of the players had dropped acid before the performance.

  Afterward, my misfit clan and I roamed the streets in our buffoon costumes, clowning and miming for the crowds as they walked between theaters. But I couldn’t give it my usual gusto. Paradox kept teasing me that I was performing the role of the mopey clown. He’d come up to me and grimace, and crouch down and sob silently, then leap up and beam at me, expecting me to laugh. I couldn’t tell him what I was thinking. That our little band was running around, sleeping in cemeteries, stealing from churches, clowning on the streets, living a kind of chaos, but unlike with the theater company we’d seen that day, our chaos had no meaning.

  Isla’s energy WAS chaos. She embodied the spirit of the Fool. In tarot, the Fool is wild, unbridled, amoral, an uncontained electricity jolting through the air looking for a conduit. Isla needed no structure, no form. She didn’t have to communicate anything or work in service to anyone. She was the cosmic elf, a creature of the void. When we were high, Isla was happy. It wasn’t tripping for her. It wasn’t a “trip” to Avalon. Her journey to the Land of the Shining Ones was a homecoming. She liked to let her entire self dissolve and be pulled apart in the waves. In contrast, the energy of Chaos Troupe was contained, harnessed to pull chariots of meaning, to move people on a deep level, to advance and go somewhere.

  Suddenly, the carousing I’d been doing with Dream Circus seemed childish to me. I wanted my work to be intelligible. It wasn’t enough any longer to rebel and reject; I wanted the work I did to mean something to people. I was so withdrawn that evening, Isla kept asking me what was wrong. She went into a shop and bought me two beautiful cashmere sweaters, one the color of Scottish heather, the other a pumpkin orange cardigan with buttons made of mother of pearl. But my smile upon receiving it wasn’t big enough. “Nothing I do is ever good enough for you,” she lamented, once again darting off into the crowd. Once again leaving me to wonder if she would just leave me in Scotland somewhere, without any money, without a wallet or even my passport.

  The next day Isla rented us a car and drove us up the coast, stopping at a pile of yellow boulders arcing in a cove around the gray North Sea. We ran down a path, stripping off our clothes, rushing headlong into the water, blasted by the northern coldness of it. The tide lifted and lowered us, our bodies burning pink, our teeth chattering. We held hands in a circle. Each taking turns, we held each other, baptizing each other as undines. Giving each other new names. Someone would float on their backs, sun blazing above. We began a spontaneous chant of hums and clicks, a fairy language that came from Mata Mari, fairy goddess of the sea. These were the moments I lived for with this clan. I lay in the cold, light shimmering on all sides, my fellow fairy children dancing in a circle around me, lifting me and singing. Faces silhouetted by the sun, I could see the shine of their eyes, burning love through the shadow.

  Rebelling, choosing the life of the artist, outsider, or witch, causes many hardships. So much self-doubt. But then there are moments like this. Moments of such raw and spontaneous beauty, when you feel like you’re living the way humans were intended, in joy, in freedom. And it seems worth it then. No other life seems possible.

  That night we arrived at an eighteenth-century estate in the Scottish Highlands Isla’d booked to prove good on the promise she made at the Russian River. We would sleep in a cast
le. To the east, a small river hugged a hillside covered in purple thistles, heather, and a small, mossy wood. Snowy horses pranced in a pasture of emerald grass, and all to the north stretched fields of grain, waist high and rolling, a golden sea stretching off into the horizon.

  The castle estate was made of pale gray stones, smooth as doves. Banners snapped above a round drive, with men in chauffeur’s caps waiting to escort the wealthy from their Lincolns and Porsches and Aston Martins as they arrived. If they were surprised to see our ragtag band tumble out of our rented Mini Cooper, tripping in our platform clown shoes, Paradox in his unitard, all of us still damp from our North Sea baptism, they gave no indication. They simply tipped their hats and pointed us toward the concierge.

  Our room was at the top of the keep, a series of suites with a heavy wooden door. As soon as we arrived in our rooms, Kiara—one of the Fates who’d introduced me to Dream Circus, and Paradox’s paramour—took a shower, then came out wearing nothing but a towel around her head as we all sat drinking the champagne waiting for us in an icy metal bucket. Later, as we were lying in our bed before dinner, Isla giggled to me, “That Kiara’s always running around naked. I feel like she’s always trying to get us to have some big free love party or something.” Isla was scandalized. I hadn’t really even noticed that Kiara was naked but Isla was baffled. “I mean, she knows we’re going out. She knows you’re my girl, so why would she do that?” No one was supposed to come between us. No one should even hint at it.

  On our last afternoon in Scotland, we sat on boulders, chanting over the mushrooms in our hands, the kind known as the “pixie caps.” We were scheduled to leave early the next morning to catch our flight from Edinburgh later in the afternoon. The river gurgled and sang as we ate the fungus, waiting for the shift to come, the shift into the fairy world, where you can see that the trees and stones and wind are alive. Where the clouds speak and the earth reveals its secrets.