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  As soon as we entered that realm, Isla appeared in her true form, with pointy ears and switching tail. Stomping all around us, stampeding to and fro. We walked the path alongside the river until we came to a small thistle plant, standing proudly in the center of the path. A little over ankle height, with a fuzzy purple head, its neck wreathed in a collar of upward spikes, its leaves furled and unfurled like living lace, full of life and twinkling brightly. I knelt next to it. “Look at this adorable little warrior,” I said, marveling. It was a challenger, a knight, daring us to pass.

  Everyone gathered around, admiring the thistle’s ferociousness. Isla reached out to caress it, then yelped, “It bit me!” She leapt back, her face bruised with rage, lips pulling back from her teeth as she roared. Isla and the thistle seemed well matched until she set upon the little plant in a fury. A force of nature, stomping, leaping, bloodthirsty, hailing a storm of stomps in her steel-toed leather work boots. Her fury didn’t relent until I pulled her back and we all stood around, gaping while she panted, catching her breath. The thistle was destroyed. Its purple blossoms ground into the mud, its stalk bent unnaturally, its roots torn from the earth.

  “What the fuck, Isla!” Paradox shouted at her.

  “It hurt me,” she protested, glowering.

  “You didn’t have to kill it,” Paradox said.

  Kiara added, “It was such a beautiful little thing.” She knelt next to the thistle, frowning, gingerly lifting its limbs to see if it could be salvaged.

  “You all care more about that stupid plant than you do about me!” Isla cried, kicking a spray of dirt at us, then shooting off down the path in a rage of smoke.

  After an hour or so, I felt like I should go find her. Leaving the wooded river, I found her standing at the edge of a meadow, watching two white horses stomping at the center, majestic and magical, as if in a fairy tale. I observed her for a while, admiring her ability to be so immersed in the moment. She could lose herself completely to beauty. Focused. No fear. None of the anxiety and doubt that were my constant companions.

  I came up and took her by the hand and we walked toward the horses. With each step the landscape changed, the ground beneath our feet growing sticky with mud. The emerald grass becoming weedy and sparse. Finally, we got to the center. I’d expected the horses to be valiant and tall, manes shimmering, nostrils velvety. But the animals were short, more like mules or ponies. Muddy, grumpy, and sway-backed, they mashed their cud with yellow stained teeth, swishing flies away with their tangled tails. “They tricked us,” Isla declared, aghast, and took me by the hand as we skulked away.

  A dusting of stars appeared above us. Warm wind from the hills urging us toward the endless waves of grain to the northwest. We ran into the never-ending purple sunset. We ran in circles through the field, in wide arcs, ducking and diving through its amber dampness. Finally, when we were deep inside and could see nothing and no one in any direction, we collapsed to the earth, coming upon each other in an embrace. In a fevered rite, we pressed our bodies to the earth. I felt certain that a thousand pagans had lain before us in this field. In the summer rites of Beltane, the fertility rites of fire, where pagans would leap over the flames and then grab a fellow reveler or several and baptize the earth with the libations of their lovemaking. When we were finished, we lay on the ground and slept entwined, waking several hours later to gaze at the stars in the clear night air, wondering who was staring back at us from faraway galaxies.

  When we returned to our hotel room, it was early morning, around 3:00 a.m. We found Kiara and Paradox sprawled on the carpet outside our hotel room door. The concierge had refused to give them the key, since their names hadn’t been added to the room register. Paradox was fuming, Kiara shivering and exhausted.

  “You didn’t put our names down. Why?” Paradox demanded.

  “I didn’t think about it.” Isla shrugged.

  “We’ve been waiting here for hours.”

  “Can we talk about this inside?” Kiara pleaded. “I need to pee.”

  Isla gritted her teeth but chose not to argue. She felt in her pockets for the key, then turned to me, eyes wide. “Do you have the keys?” she asked.

  I shook my head. Paradox stiffened.

  “Fuck,” Isla said.

  “Can’t you just get extra ones at the front desk?” I asked.

  It was late at night. There was no one at the front desk when we entered. The hotel staff was small. There were few guests. “The trouble is,” Isla said reluctantly, “the car keys. I attached them to the hotel keys.” She looked at me. “We must have lost them in the field.”

  Paradox was aghast. “You lost the car keys too?”

  “Just give me a second to figure this out.” Isla glowered at him.

  “We’re leaving the country in the morning. How are we going to do that without a car? We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Jesus Christ! You’re so ungrateful! I’ll figure it out,” Isla said, pounding on her little skull as if it were a broken TV.

  I watched all of this with dismay. We’d been traveling together for several weeks by then. Everyone looked like they were about to cry, then punch each other.

  “I’ll get the keys,” I said.

  “From that field?” Paradox scoffed.

  “No, babe.” Isla shook her head, smiling at me, her endearing pet. “There’s no way. It’d be like finding them at the bottom of the ocean.”

  I went out into the night. I don’t know what possessed me to say I could find those keys. Dawn was approaching, the field shivering and shimmering. I stood at its edge and looked out. I could feel a presence there. Male. A different kind of father than the ones I’d been used to. Ancient, generous, and benevolent. Holy. I felt something click over in me. A sense of purpose.

  To the guardian of the field, I said:

  “O! You, harvest guardian, father of the grain. Wise one and benefactor, I honor and acknowledge you. Come, join me. Guide my hands and lead me. The keys are here somewhere. Guide me to them.”

  I waited until I sensed an acknowledgment from the Spirit of the Wheat and waded in, the golden strands rustling around my waist. I let my eyelids fall heavy. The presence felt like love, pulling me like a magnet as I trailed my fingertips along its stalks, shifting in the bronze morning twilight. They dipped in a wake behind me as I walked, as though there were someone following behind me, also trailing their fingers through the grain. I was alone, but the guardian was everywhere. The hairs stood on the back of my neck, my hands flickering with electricity, as they always do when Spirit appears. Behind me I could see the castle in the distance, small and sparkling against the hills nearly half a mile away. Something snagged me on my right, a sharp pull. I looked down and saw a piece of white on the ground that I first mistook for trash. It was the keys. THE KEYS. Hiding, there in a tangle of roots. Once I had them in my hand, I had the sense I should leave immediately. I strode back toward the castle feeling a new sense of power and purpose, stopping only at the edge of the field to kneel and give thanks to the spirit that had helped me.

  The magic I felt so keenly in the wheat field began to dissipate the moment we arrived back in San Francisco. I grew increasingly dissatisfied. Isla felt me pulling away from her. She kept saying we could go back to Europe whenever I wanted, but her business always got in the way. Our fights increased. Isla grew ever more outraged and self-destructive, pounding her head against the wall and scratching at her arms until they bled. In those moments, I couldn’t help thinking of what happened to that thistle.

  One night I had a dream. I was standing on the street during a parade; all my friends stood around me asking, “Where should I go, Amanda? What should I do with my life?” A prophetic dream, since now, twenty years later, these are questions my clients commonly ask me. But back then, I didn’t have answers. In my dream, a fire truck came blazing down the street with a man standing on top of it wearing a suit and a top hat: a magician tossing tarot cards to the crowd below him like folks t
oss beads from Mardi Gras floats. In the tarot, the Magician is the first of the major arcana, the archetypal cards that make a tarot deck a tarot deck. The Magician encourages you to make choices, to take the first leap that launches you on your journey. In my dream, I said to myself, “How can I tell anybody what they should do with their life or where they should be? I don’t even know where I should go.” As soon as I said these words, the Magician held up a big sign that read: “Amsterdam! Amsterdam! Amsterdam!”

  A few days after that dream, I found myself at a party talking to this guy who’d just gotten back from working with a dance company in Belgium. I told him that I wanted to study dance in Europe but that I didn’t know where I should go. “You should go to the School for New Dance Development,” he told me.

  “Where is it?” I asked him.

  “Amsterdam,” he replied.

  Chapter 8

  Signs, Spells, and Omens

  She was the daughter of the Virgin of Montserrat, and she felt instinctively and of course heretically that the Virgin herself was only a symbol of a yet greater sister-mother who was carefree and sorrowful all at once, a goddess who didn’t guide you or shield you but only went with you from place to place and added her tangible presence to your own when required.

  Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

  I have a client whom I love. She has a pink bedroom, a menagerie of pets, and does raw, fierce performance art, dancing naked and hate-fucking Marlon Brando. She often texts me to ask what things mean. What does it mean, for example, when she keeps seeing the same numbers over and over again? 11-11-11. When the boy she has a crush on shows up wearing a unicorn shirt and she was just talking about unicorns? If the thunder that cracked at the moment of her breakup means that she made the right choice or the wrong one? Are these signs? What do these signs mean? “Now is a powerful time in your life,” I usually tell her. “You’ve got the magical heat. Be careful. And go slowly.”

  A sign’s meaning is contingent on context and quality. Of course, we want our signs to mean that we’re going to get everything we want, that we’re doing everything right. But while it’s true that our Spirit Allies do send us messages, usually they’re saying something like, “Look up, pay attention, consider the nuances.” If the boy you have a crush on shows up to the party wearing a unicorn shirt, you would do well to remember that unicorns are elusive, often temperamental, and difficult. Some say only a virgin can tame a unicorn, while others say unicorns are imaginary. His unicorn shirt is a signal that there’s something of significance about this person in your life. But I wouldn’t start naming your future fur-babies just yet.

  Everything around us is constantly communicating, singing of its history, its composition, its desires and experiences. The Universe is made of information. Signs appear when, out of the universal hum, we pay attention to that one voice: Spirit’s serenade just to us. And those signs mean something. But if we ignore our signs, their meaning collapses, trees falling in the forest with no one to hear them. Had I disregarded my Amsterdam dream and chosen to stay in San Francisco or move to New York, my dream wouldn’t have meant anything. I may have forgotten it altogether. If we fail to recognize them, there are no signs.

  Most often, we only look for signs when we are uncertain, when we lack confidence that we are making the right decision, or when we really want something but aren’t sure that we can get it. When we have everything we want, we stop paying attention to the messages. In tarot readings, people often want to keep drawing cards until they get the message that they want to hear. But interpreting the messages as they come to us, rather than as we wish they were, is the whole point of divination. It’s in the interpretation of signs that we become oracular, and it’s in acting with confidence on those messages that we become witches.

  When I arrived in Amsterdam and checked myself into Bob’s Youth Hostel, I had $200 left to my name. I’d been traveling around Europe for months by then; Amsterdam was my final destination. Beds in the girls’ dorm were 12 guilders a night. If I spent no money on food or anything else, my money would last just over two weeks. My intention was to search out and conquer the School for New Dance Development, the school the dancer I’d met at that party in San Francisco had told me about nearly half a year before. As soon as I arrived, I started getting signs that I was in the right place.

  My first morning in Amsterdam, I ate breakfast in my youth hostel dinette. The basement room was packed with travelers all bundled up in scarves, their wool hats pulled low, the air damp with their breath and melted snow evaporating from their nylon backpacks. I sat writing in my journal. I leaned quietly against the back wall, willing myself to be unseen and anonymous so that I could focus amidst the din. I was about to write, “I wish that I could get a job at this youth hostel and work here for free board.” I began the sentence, but didn’t have time to finish it, because of all the people in the crowded room, the owner of the hostel sat down next to me and asked me if I wanted a job. Mission accomplished! Amsterdam was beginning to welcome me already; clearly I was meant to be there.

  Next problem: even with free board, if I bought a couple of hot dinners, a proper winter coat, and a new book, I’d be destitute. Not being Dutch, there were few jobs available to me. I had no interest in working Amsterdam’s sex industry. The women in Red Light paced their little glass dens, eyes wild, hearts desperate; they grimaced and flashed their teeth at the men hovering outside their windows like predatory moths. Walking by, I could see that it was just a thin pane of glass (and my American passport—most of them were from the former Soviet Union or the global south) that separated me from the women inside. Geography is destiny.

  The only other jobs open to foreigners were in what the Dutch referred to euphemistically as “coffee shops.” The coffee they sold was watered down Nescafé. What they really sold was hashish and marijuana. Since pot had been legal in Holland since the 1970s, the Dutch were mainly bored by it. Few Dutch people had any interest in working in a coffee shop, and so you would find many foreigners working there.

  Most of the coffee shops in Amsterdam were in the Red Light District, next to the prostitutes, sex shops, and torture museums hawking medieval iron maidens and thumbscrews. The commerce of the area stood in stark contrast to the picturesque canals, arched bridges, and houseboats so cheerfully lining the streets. Entering the Red Light from the Damrak, Amsterdam’s main thoroughfare jutting out from Central Station, I began my search for employment with confidence. My plan was to begin at the first coffee shop and work my way up and down the streets until I found a job. I entered coffee shop after coffee shop, each one playing trance or techno or jungle, selling space cake glowing beneath green neon lights, murals of bug-eyed aliens smoking spliffs painted on their walls. I went into shop after shop with no luck, eventually fearing my luck at the youth hostel was just a fluke.

  As I pushed my way east and neared the far edge of the Red Light, the shops were thinning along with my morale. My toes had grown cold and difficult to bend in my Victorian lace-up boots and thin cotton socks. Ahead was the last coffee shop in the district. It would be my seventy-first attempt to get a job that day. The place was called De Oude Kerk, named after the street it was on, Old Church Street, but all the regular clients called it Rasta Baby, like its sister shop down by the docks. Unlike the other coffee shops I’d been to that day booming techno or the Grateful Dead, this place was Rastafarian. Reggae bass nudged ceramic teacups toward the edge of the tables. On the back wall was a mural of a defiant-looking Prince Emmanuel, the solemn child prophet of the Rastafarians, arms folded, head cocked. He glowered with dismay at the stoned tourists slouched low in their seats, giggling to each other as if they were getting away with something as they tried to roll their joints.

  Orlando, who owned De Oude Kerk, was Surinamese. He spoke slowly with an air that was both amused and patient, like everything was an inside joke he shared with whomever he was speaking to. He ran gambling upstairs and liked to have girls
working the bar of the coffee shop by themselves. Though dangerous for the girls, it was good for business. As soon as I walked in, he offered me the job. After pounding the pavement all day and finally getting a job, I thought to myself, We make our own luck.

  Aside from the girls working alone, it was mainly a male clientele. Initially I’d stand behind the counter, taciturn and unfriendly, constantly on guard against someone taking advantage of my vulnerability guarding money and weed in a room full of inebriated men. Half the clients were European, American, or Australian tourists; they would order the strongest weed they could get, and then swiftly slump, foreheads crashing to the table. The other half were immigrants from the former Dutch colony of Suriname. They’d moved to Holland to find a better life but had ended up selling hard drugs on the cold, bitter streets of the Red Light District. The Surinamese always bought the weakest weed available, a tinq Colombian, and then would hang out and chat with each other for hours. Their relationship to the plant was social, in contrast to the tourists looking for escape. Mariella, an Italian girl who looked like a stunned opossum, worked the day shift. Mistrustful and sly, my first day at work she warned me that the drug dealers would try to steal from me and belittle me. “You have to watch them every second and be very hard with them or they will take advantage of you,” she told me sourly. They’d try and do heroin in the bathroom. They’d turn the place into a drug den. And in fact, in my first week, I did catch one man doing heroin in the bathroom, which was strictly forbidden by the owner. But when I tried to make him leave, he roared and towered over me by a foot, threatening and protesting, while the other men in the room sat silently rolling their joints.