You can get used to anything...almost.  Once you do, once you've "gotten used to" something extraordinary, the ordinary stuff you were used to before kinda qualifies as extraordinary itself.

Let me show you what I mean.

The Universe is a deeply mysterious place, and its most deeply mysterious corner is Earth.

I’d known Cecilia a long time.  We met at work during a pretty tumultuous period of my life.  A girl I’d been engaged to had abruptly dumped me (I never did get an explanation), and I felt the need to make as many changes as I could, in a way, running away from the misery while staying put.  I didn’t have the means to pack up and move to a different country, which would have been my preferred course, so did the next best thing; I acquired a totally different circle of friends.

I’d been working at a dead-end telemarketing job for the summer, and one of the kooks in the office with me was Cecilia.  She was a stellar performer when it came to selling renewals to Playboy magazine.  Her most singular distinguishing feature was her personality, which I personally found enthralling.  There was something of the gypsy in her expressions and movements, something about her like a sultry ballerina, and something in her accent that suggested she had lived abroad, Germany maybe.

For all this, she was not a particularly fine-looking girl.  If there was something of the gypsy in her ways, there was something of the gypsy’s cart horse in her features.  I won’t go into the catalogue of what was good looking and bad looking about her, as most male writers do, other than to say that she was completely ordinary, with ordinary hair, ordinary skin, and an ordinary figure – apart from a vague resemblance to a Shetland pony.  But her gaze was very penetrating, and if it hadn’t been, I’d have made it up and said it was anyway.  What happened later was so remarkable, one kind of demands that its protagonist (or antagonist, if you like) couldn’t possibly not have had a penetrating gaze.

In this case, I don’t have to pretend it was thus; looking Cecilia in the eye wasn’t usually a bad experience, but it was never a completely comfortable one.

By and by I caught her at a diner across the street from work, doing a tarot card reading for one of the other girls from our so-called “office.”  I didn’t intrude.  I really really wanted to, but just nodded politely at the two like you’re supposed to do when you see two people you know huddled over tarot cards in a diner.  I bought my toasted everything bagel with cream cheese, large coffee, and split.  I did, very predictably, glance over my shoulder at the two as I left, and Cecilia had her eyes on me as she was chatting away with the other girl.  I don’t even remember the other girl’s name.   Might have been Donna.

I made sure to not take any breaks at work that day until Cecilia did, so I could corner her in the break-room and get to the bottom of this.  She very matter-of-factly told me that she was a student of the occult, just like anyone else would talk about their favorite band or football team.  I suspected bullshit.  I decided to get my foot in the door, so asked her what she could tell me about tarot cards, because I was curious about the whole thing.

She invited me to a party she was having and said that she was teaching a few others how to do various occult things and would be happy to take me on as a student as well.  I said, “Well, I’m just interested in tarot cards.”  “Not really, you aren’t,” she replied, as she looked more right into my eyes than I think anyone ever had before or has since, excepting Cecilia.  “You’re interested in everything.”

Well…yeah.

So I became her student.  The only thing she really taught me personally was tarot, and she seemed pleased with my abilities.  She said I’d “hit the right mix of erudition and intuition.”  Anyway, I was good at it.  Still am.  If I tell you something’s going to happen, it’ll happen and do so never less than 97.5% the way I tell you it’s going to.

But as for the other things I learned, it was more what I learned about her than from her.  We became close (no, dammit, not like that) and I was a frequent overnight guest (no…no…no) at her house.  We spent many a boozy evening on the sofa (Nope.) in front of the fire (Stop it.) talking about metaphysics and magick (yes, the kind with a k on the end) and reincarnation and various forms and methods of divination and the Philosopher’s Stone and what really IS an omegahedron and whether the Necronomicon was just bullshit, real, or something in between.  Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn came up frequently. 

She had other students, but was in the habit of dismissing these fairly soon after taking them on.  I started thinking of myself as a “special project” in that the only thing I really studied formally under her was tarot and a few other forms of divination, whereas the others who came and went were people she seemed to be recruiting to be her own “sorcerer’s apprentices.”  She’d try out two or three at a time, and after two or three weeks, I’d see that at least one had been dismissed.  Some stayed longer, but not by much. 

I had various feelings about these pupils.  Mostly, I disliked them.  Personalities of all types and sexual orientations breezed through her little one-professor school.  They didn’t seem to have anything in common except their fascination with Cecilia.  How fascinated they were didn’t seem to have anything to do with how long they stayed in her good graces though.  I asked her about it directly only once.

I’m uncertain whether I remember her explanation so poorly because I was drunk when I heard it or because she was drunk when she gave it, but it went something like, “There are some ceremonies that require two people to perform and it can’t just be any two people; they have to be matched in a certain way.”

Well well well…sounded sexy.  It wasn’t, it turned out.  It had nothing to do with sex, unfortunately, but everything to do with personality attributes.  “The thing that bugs me, Rick, about it is that the kind of person I’m looking for isn’t one who’s really drawn to the occult, ‘cause it just wouldn’t occur to them.  You get somebody who wants to be on the inside of the occult, and you get them in the circle and try doing the thing you’re trying to do, and guess what, Rick?  Guess what?”

“What, Cece?”

“They end up interfering.  They don’t mean to, but they’re too interested in what’s happening.  Even if they’re just standin’ there with their hands in their pockets, in their hearts and minds they’re not just standing there, they’re participating.  I can’t have that, can I, Rick?”

“I dunno.  If you say you can’t, I guess you can’t.”

“Not for what I’m trying do to…to do…”

“So you need a cow.”

“What?  Wait…right!  I need a cow!  Somebody to just stand there or sit there or lay there and drink…uh…think about his taxes or his homework or his mother or something.  Pretend like I’m not doing what I’m doing.  No, don’t ask, I’m not telling.  I see the look on your face, Rick, I read you like a book, man.  And no, you’re not a cow so don’t even ask the other thing.”

How she did that, I don’t know.  Well, I didn’t know at the time, but I got used to it.  She could be looking at the back of my head and tell what I was thinking.  That isn’t hyperbole; we really tried it and yes, she could read my mind.  Not all the time, though.  There were some days when it seemed impossible, others when she couldn’t miss.  I’d deliberately think of the most random things I could – Marie Osmond painting her nails for one – and Cecilia would stare at the back of my head and tell me what color nail polish she was using and that she was chewing gum as she did it…and she was right.

Another thing she seemed good at was hypnosis.  At most parties she was invited to, I’ve seen her exert the most extraordinary influence over others.  Parties are where she found most of her students, by the way.  If someone was suggestible, that is, if they were easy to hypnotize, odds were good she’d recruit them as a student.  Maybe she hypnotized them into it!  I wouldn’t be at all surprised, given what else she got people to do at these parties.

Like what?  I knew you were going to ask that…Tarot cards, remember?

Her favorite trick was also her most diabolical - making trouble in people’s relationships.  I think she chose this because being able to pull it off was a sign of what a great sorcerer she was.  She had a very distinct method, and showmanship was absolutely part of it.

Whoever invited her to the party usually did so because Cecilia was so good with tarot, and party guests LOVE having their cards read.  While she would be doing this, she or someone else would let drop that she was also a gifted hypnotist.  Nobody believed this, but everyone kinda hoped it was true, so in short order everyone would be sitting on the floor in a circle with Cecilia sort of at the top, and all she had to do was say, “Who wants to go first?” and hands would go up.

Some of the things she hypnotically suggested were harmless and silly, of the “You’re a chicken!” variety.  Others were extremely interesting.  She once told a frankly beautiful girl she was a man, and left her that way for the rest of the party, to the utter consternation of the actual men at the party whose advances were returned with angry scowls and foul language by the girl.

But her favorite trick, as I said above, was to make trouble in people’s relationships.  You might get anybody who isn’t really hypnotized to play along and pretend to be a chicken or get a girl to pretend to be a man for the fun of it.  This fact isn’t lost on anybody.  But to make trouble between boyfriends and girlfriends, or husbands and wives, all of whom presumably love each other, isn’t something people are going to go along with for fun, and it leaves an impression on everyone. 

She got the men to say all kinds of things about their girlfriends and wives, and the women to say all kinds of things about their husbands and boyfriends.  Cecilia would get them to tell each other’s secrets, their own damning secrets anybody would want to keep from their significant other, and so forth.  I’ve seen trouble started at these parties by Cecilia that escalated a few months later into full blown divorces.

“Amy, you have no choice but to tell the truth when I ask you, ‘What do you hate about Robert?’”  And then Amy would very casually and frankly discuss everything she hated about her husband of five years; his physical attributes and flaws, his sexual technique and perversions, his looking at other women….his looking at other men…etc etc etc…  Meanwhile, the expression on poor Robert’s face was like, well, you can imagine.

And how did she get these people to do whatever she wanted?  She looked at them.  That’s it, man, she looked at them.  No swinging watch, no counting backwards or colored lights or other mumbo jumbo.  She just looked right into the other person’s eyes, then, when she was sure she had their attention, she got a certain expression on her own face, and thereafter whatever she told them to do or talk about…just happened.

It was at such a party that she met this gay couple, Phil and Steve. 

I’d known Steve a long time, since we had a class in college together.  It was medieval history, and I had bought only one of the several books required, and it turned out he had the one I didn’t and I had the one he didn’t.  So we arranged to swap at his place one day as I was coming home from work, and at his place I met…his sister, Carolyn. 

She was gorgeous!  They were roommates!  Ha!  Perfect!

Man, I got myself invited to that apartment as often as I could.  I’m a pretty good conversationalist, and have a nice repertoire of stories ranging from funny to eerie, so I regularly found myself on the guest lists for Steve and Phil’s parties. 

In the end, I never made any headway with Carolyn, but I kid you not, I learned how to throw one hell of a proper dinner party.  I know what wine goes with what kind of entrée, what kind of dessert to serve with it, what kind of music sets what kind of mood.  Steve taught me how to cook gourmet-style, and I’d have no idea who Dave Brubeck was if it weren’t for that cat.

So Cecilia and I got invited to one of her current student’s parties and Phil and Steve were already there.  Steve was like, “Oooh, check it out, Richard’s here…and he’s got a GIRL with him!”  And Phil’s like, “Breeders!”

I had a hard time believing Phil was gay.  There was something about him that said he wasn’t. The oldest friends he had were all straight guys.  I never really suspected him of being bisexual, either.  I always kinda got the feeling around him that he was gay the way some kids are punk-rockers – just to piss off their parents.  It’s like he was only gay if he knew someone was looking at him. 

Steve had a few understated gay tendencies that triggered my “gaydar” the moment we met.  He was always just a little too-tastefully and fashionably dressed, and his grooming was always a little too squeaky clean and polished, and of course he had perfect manners.  He was the perfect host at all times, and would only loosen up a bit at other people’s parties.  If I’d brought Cecilia to one of his and Phil’s parties, he’d NEVER have teased me about it.

So…Phil and Steve are at this party, and I can see Cecilia has been drawn to the pair and spent half her time talking to one or the other of them.  I can just about see the wheels turning in her head.  She’s probably thinking about recruiting one to replace tonight’s host as her student, but there’s a little twinkle in her eye that I haven’t seen before.

The evening wears on, as the saying goes, and everybody’s starting to feel like it’s time to take a break from the loud music and shouting over it and all the hard drinking, but nobody’s ready to split.  You know exactly what I mean, yeah?  It’s like, “This is great and all, but for like 30 minutes, let’s just have quiet time.”  At a slumber party, this is where the girls gather around and tell ghost stories.

Well, it’s that time, and about twenty guests and one host are nagging Cecilia to do her hypnosis thing.  She lights a big fat column candle and tells everybody to sit on the floor around it as best they can.  I already have a seat cushion in my hand.  Believe me, I do not relish sitting even five minutes on a hard wood floor like this one was, so when I saw which way the wind was blowing, I secured mine right away.  You see, my legs go to sleep otherwise…

Cecilia asked, “Who’d like to go first?”  Most hands went up.  Steve’s didn’t.  Phil’s didn’t.  Cece picked a girl and in ten seconds had her thinking she was an opera singer auditioning for a role in Paris.  The only thing amiss was that the songs she was singing – since she didn’t know any opera – were the folk songs they teach you in 4th grade.  She sang as well as any real opera singer; I never heard a prettier, more angelic performance of “Lavender’s Blue.”  Smartphones popped out and were recording her performance faster than you could say “polly wolly doodle all the day.”  A good thing they were, because in ten minutes she was her old self and didn’t remember any of it.

“Who wants to be next – to go a little deeper?”

She selected a male this time, a high school dropout who worked the cash register at a local gas station, and regressed him back to a former life.  He seemed able to understand English, but not respond in it, since he was speaking German.  One of the other guests was an American soldier who’d been stationed in Munich, and translated with difficulty, since it was, according to him, “The kind of German they spoke about the time Shakespeare was writing plays.”  You’ll be glad to know that the biggest thing worrying Father Kraus of Vienna in 1590 was keeping the old church organ going; they had been having problems with leaks in something called a wind-chest.

This gave Cecilia a novel idea, and the next person who raised their hand when asked who would like to “go a little deeper” was a girl named Cosette, and Cecilia told her she could heal the sick.  Cecilia then asked the group if anyone had something medically or physically wrong with them.   No one had so much as a sniffle, but Steve asked, “Would being color-blind count, Cecilia?  I’ve only ever been able to see shades of gray my entire life.” 

“Let’s see!” said Cecilia.  She then directed Cosette to lay hands on Steve and give him normal sight.  Cosette got up, walked over to where Steve sat, smiling politely, and told him to close his eyes.  Once he’d done so, she rested her hands on his head for about as long as it takes to take three breaths, and then returned to her seat.

“May I open my eyes?”

“You’d better.  The cops frown on driving home by feel!” said Cecilia. 

Steve opened his eyes, blinked at the candle in the center of the floor, and very softly asked, “What color is the candle?  Not the flame – the candle itself.”

“Red,” said Phil.

“Red.  That’s red.  Richard, your shirt is dark red and…?”

“Navy blue.  And this shade of red is called burgundy.”

“Burgundy, as in the wine, that color?”

“Close.  What else do you see?”

“That young lady’s necklace is the most dazzling thing I’ve ever seen…  Is it gold or silver?”

“Gold, and the beads are emerald green crackle glass,” she said.

Steve sat there examining his hands, his clothes, and looking at objects around the room glittering in the candle-light.

“How could anyone be sad living in a world this beautiful?” 

“Good question,” said Phil.  Steve looked like he was about to weep.  Phil looked like he was about to weep.  Everybody looked like they were about to weep. 

“Steve, would you agree that it’s only fair you’re the next to go under my spell – to take things a little deeper?”  There was something a trifle cold in Cece’s tone.

Smiling away, he replied, “My dear Cecilia, after this, I could hardly refuse you anything!  By all means consider me at your disposal.”

“I’ll buy that!” she said.  She and Steve looked very directly at each other, and in a moment, Cece gave him the look, and asked, “Which of you loves the other more, you, or Phil?”  It was a “WTF Moment” for all of us, especially Phil.  The only thing funny about it was how everyone’s head instantly turned toward Cecilia, with expressions universally fixed in “you’ve got to be kidding me!” stares.  Cecilia shrugged.

Steve answered the question.  “Phil loves me more, except when I love him more.”

“Why is that, Steve?”

“He loves me more because he isn’t really gay.  Phil is completely straight, and doesn’t think I know.  But he loves me, even though I was born a man, and that’s why he loves me more than I love him.  But how could I not love a man who loves me so deeply and so openly when it’s against every fiber of his nature?  And that’s when I love him more than he loves me.”

Steve’s answer defused the moment for everyone, except, obviously, Phil.  Throughout this little experiment, he’d had his eyes closed and his head bowed, unwilling to betray any emotion at all.  But after Cecilia released Steve, Phil shot her a glance that probably would’ve killed anyone else.  In the moment it took him to regain his composure, Cecilia had noticed.

“Yeah, Rick, I knew Steve had something wrong with him, but I didn’t know what.  I saw how you looked at Phil and it was obvious you didn’t think he was gay.  It was written all over your face, man!”

“Ok, but how did you know Phil was straight?”

“By looking at you, man!  You’re an open book next to Phil.  Steve? He’s easy to read, but mostly what he thinks about is ‘Oh God, what if someone doesn’t like me…”

“Really?  I never got that from him.  Anyway, what if your little experiment didn’t work?  What if Cosette had tried to fix Steve’s eyes and couldn’t pull it off?”

“No harm done, except maybe to my reputation, right?  Then I’d say, ‘Well, it was just an experiment folks, strictly spur of the moment.  Too bad it didn’t work, but imagine if it had!’”

“Yeah, but Cece, it did work.”

“And now my reputation is going to be better than ever.”

“Yes, well, about that.  I guarantee you everyone went home pretty amazed, but the thing they’ll be thinking about when they’re finished thinking about everything else isn’t gonna be Cosette fixing Steve’s eyesight, but the spot you put him and Phil in.  I didn’t like it much, and I still don’t like it much.”

“You need another drink, Rick.  Your glass is empty.”

“I do need another drink.  And the other thing about your reputation, aren’t you afraid everybody on earth is going to show up on your doorstep with their aches and pains now?”

“Doubt it.  I’m not the healer.  Cosette’s the healer.”

“Because you made her think she was.”

“If she didn’t already have the gift, she couldn’t have pulled it off.”  She paused a long moment, and continued, “Supernatural gifts like these tend to run in families, so maybe she comes from a long line of people just like her, but who were not sure about it.  So, I just took away any doubts she had, and that let the thing out.”

“Like a genie out of the bottle.”

“Mm-hmm.” 

“Ok then,” and I took a sip from my glass, “since you’re so intent on building your reputation for some reason, what happens when Cosette tries to heal someone and she can’t because you ‘de-hypnotized’ her?”

“I didn’t, dahling.”  Even when she wasn’t three sheets or more to the wind, there was a lot of “drunken Irishman” in her vocabulary, but if this, there was also a little “Greta Garbo” in her accent.

“What?!?  That kid is still walking around thinking she can heal the sick?”

“No.  Cosette is walking around able to heal the sick.  I left her in the ‘on’ position, man.”

“Egad!”

“Stroinkenhoefly.”

“What?”

“Stroinkenhoefly!  People say ‘Exactly’ so much it makes me sick.  So I invented ‘Stroinkenhoefly’ to have something different to say whenever I feel like saying ‘Exactly.’  Get it?”

“Uh…ok, yeah, I get it.  Kinda funny…”

“Yeah man!  Don’t be so serious all the time!”

“Cece, you’re the coolest person I know, but sometimes, I worry about you.”

“Have you heard from Steve?”

“Have I!  All the time.  Ever since the party, he’s been going on about how everything is just so beautiful.  Phil took him to some art museums in DC, and tells me Steve cried his eyes out at the Cherry Blossom Festival last weekend.”

“Well…who wouldn’t, Rick?  That’s it from Steve?”

“And Phil. Pretty much.”

“Not interested in learning the craft at all?  In acquiring some of the mystical powers himself that gave his world its colors?”

“No, but Phil has said he wants to meet you.  He didn’t sound too happy when he said it.”

“That doesn’t surprise me either, and it’s ok.  I can handle Phil, I think.”

“Don’t be too sure, Cece.  You outed him in a way, and in front of some people he knew.  I don’t know how he’s handling it now, but I know you saw the look on his face then. You might’ve made an enemy there, babe.”

“Another to add to a growing list.  I may have to do something about Ashley.  She won’t stop bugging me.”

“Still coming around?  It’s been months!”

“She was a sly one, which is why I terminated the arrangement.  Now she’s practically stalking me.  I can feel her sometimes, querying the astral plane about me, checking up on me, and she knows I know about it.”

“A psychic spy.  Great.  You worried?”

“Nope.  I have quite a few options.”

“Like what, get the local court to issue a psychic restraining order?!?”

“Naah.  But, you never know.  She may fall asleep at the wheel one day, or suddenly have an overwhelming impulse to drink herself to death.”

“Better watch out, kid.  Karma’s a bitch.”

“Sometimes, but it’ll be hers, won’t it?”

“Getting what she deserves, huh?”

“Now you’re talkin’, Rick!”

“Still, a bit extreme.  Why not just infatuate her with someone else?  Make her fall in love with Phil!”

“Nah, that’d only work if she had a thing for me.  She doesn’t.  She’s just ambitious.  Anyway, I got plans for Phil and Steve, now that Steve passed his test, man!”

“Wait…what?”

“Come on, Rick…  I gave him an intensely personal and dramatic manifestation of real occult power, one that changed the way he’s seeing the whole world.  Despite this, he’s not even 1% interested in studying the occult.  This, and how easy he is to hypnotize, makes him a highly qualified cow, Rick.”

“You know, you’re evil at multiple levels, Cece.”

“One person’s evil is another person’s good.  Dude, we’ve already had that talk!”

“Yeah.  We have.  So did Rasputin.  Let’s open that other bottle.”

Cecilia was something of a force of nature, in her way.  I knew nothing about her family, but speculated that she must’ve been the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, or something like that.  Whatever power she had was something exceptional, something she was born with that almost no one else had.  It wasn’t like anyone could acquire these skills to the degree she had them just by study and practice.  Everyone’s a little bit psychic, it’s true, but not to the same degree.  I think her gifts were exceptionally rare, like one in 100 million or something.  She had taken these and upgraded them through the years in numerous ways, and some were somewhat unsavory.

When people ask me to explain magick, I ask them to imagine a river.  The water comes from where it comes from and goes on down to the sea, because that’s its nature.  It gets its bed wet, and its banks wet.  Fish live in it.  But by itself it’s little use to the human race until someone finds a way to tap it.  You can take a bucket full of water from this river and use it to wash something, or make plants grow, or take a drink.  You can impound the water with a dam and generate electricity with it.

Well, there’s a river flowing through the universe, but instead of water, say it’s a river of the Power of Creation.  Living things are its banks, its bed, and all the creatures swimming in it.  Magick is an effort to dip a bucket into this river and use the “water” for one’s own purposes.  Most people who try this find that they’ve got holes in their bucket, or what they thought was a bucket is really an eye-dropper.  99% of the time, nothing happens or it produces unintended consequences.

I belonged to a group for a while that was a typical mixed bag of wannabes and serious occult students.  Some were high-schoolers, and one Sunday night they got a notion to make it snow so the schools would be closed on Monday.  We ended up dancing and chanting around a tree in the woods, like you’re supposed to do, right?  In the wee hours of the following morning, the next county got a tornado.  In February.  This is what I mean, and it’s the main reason I never tried to acquire any of the skills Cece could have taught me, apart from the tarot.  God forbid.

But Cecilia?  She didn’t have a bucket, she had a pump, and could hose the “water” around like a firefighter if she felt like it.  I don’t know what the objective was for some of her ceremonies, because I wasn’t privy to them, but sometimes she didn’t need one. 

I remember this thing that happened.  We arrived at the mall just outside Fredericksburg in fair weather that turned on us while we were shopping, so we were going to have to cross the parking lot in a downpour as we left.  I whined about how the umbrella was in my car, but Cece said, “We won’t need it, Rick.”  And we didn’t.  We crossed that parking lot surrounded by torrential rain and the only parts of our bodies that got wet were our feet from stepping in puddles and our hands from touching the door handles on the car. 

How’d she do it?  She just got a look on her face, grabbed my elbow, and started walking.  Another day, I got a call from her and the only thing she said was, “Brace for impact, Rick!” then hung up.  About ten seconds later there was the loudest clap of thunder I ever heard…and on a hot sunny day too…

What couldn’t she do?  There were a lot of things she didn’t do.  I never definitely saw her acquire a lover through magick, never saw her try to feather her own nest with it by conjuring up a winning lotto ticket or something.  I don’t think she ever saw the inside of a casino, and that’s probably a good thing.

She had a kind of ethics, in her way.  Heartbroken people would approach her for some spell or charm or magick potion to get someone to fall in love with them – usually an estranged former lover.  But she wouldn’t go for it.  Oh, she’d give them something, but never what they asked for.  She’d say something like how wrong it was to use magick to force people to fall in love, that sort of thing.  It comes back as bad karma.  Instead, she’d give them something that was sure to attract their true perfect match, but that what happened next was in their own hands.  This occasionally produced results I’d describe as “interesting,” but that’s another story.  Let me just refer you to the stories about genies and how tricky it is to get a wish granted that doesn’t somehow backfire.

And she never charged for any of this.  It was all part of some strategy of hers, to build her reputation, attract the right kind of people, and make them available for magickal objectives of her own.

Steve was apparently just what she was looking for in that way…the cow of her dreams.

Spring was in full swing, and Steve and Phil were regulars at Cecilia’s place.  Phil wanted to study, but Cece wouldn’t take him unless Steve studied too, but on separate days.  It was almost a deal-breaker, but Phil wanted some of what Cecilia had badly enough that he made it happen.

It was clear to me that whatever Steve was learning was not having a wholesome effect on him.  Magick involves a lot of meditation as preparation, and if someone meditates, it usually does them some kind of good.  They become more calm, cool, and collected, at least.

But not Steve.  He started out calm, cool, and collected, was that way when I met him, anyway, but after a few weeks under Cece’s guidance acquired some nervous habits.  He was jumpy, let himself go a little grooming-wise, which surprised me, but at the same time he seemed more conscious about his appearance.  I assured him he looked ok, and at first chalked it up to his suddenly getting his colour vision and being uncertain about whether his wardrobe choices really matched, since, of course, he’d always dressed in earth tones like combinations of grey, black and brown before.  He took up smoking...Misty’s, of all things.  Smoking was something that he’d been dead set against before.  Cece smoked like a chimney, of course, and not always tobacco.

Phil, on the other hand, had found his element.  I seldom discussed her students’ progress with Cece apart from “So, how’s so-and-so working out?”  But she brought Phil up herself, pretty often.  He was a driven student and she was sure he had an agenda, but couldn’t read him well enough to say what it was.  Steve was a blank slate when it came to figuring out Phil’s agenda, since whatever it was, Phil never shared it with him.  She could read Steve easily enough, but she couldn’t read what wasn’t there.  As for Phil’s natural abilities, they were about average, according to Cece, but he made up for it with determination.

This rubbed Cece the wrong way.  As far as I could tell, her only objective in agreeing to train Phil was to get access to Steve.  She therefore trained Phil rather grudgingly, and one complaint I heard from him was that she would tell him that he just wasn’t ready to learn something he’d read about.  And he had started reading a lot and wanted to do all these crazy things – conjure up spirits of the dead, invoke elementals, alter the weather…all kinds of things.  The one thing she taught him up front was the one thing he seemed to be hampered with – divination – predicting the future, clairvoyance, discerning the truth about something, solving unsolved crimes, that sort of thing.  He confided to me that he felt she was interfering with him in some way, and although I never asked her up front, I suspected he was right.  I kept this opinion to myself, though shouldn’t have, given how things worked out.

I tried as much as possible to put the Phil-Steve-Cece triangle out of my mind.  I had enough of my own projects and problems to deal with, and in any event I came to feel uncomfortable talking to any of these people about any of the others, which seemed to happen with unpleasantly increasing frequency.  I even turned down dinner party invitations from Phil and Steve a few times in a row, and would have been wiser not to, since this sent up red flags as far as Steve was concerned.

I answered the door one evening and found him standing there, already smoking.

“Got a minute, Richard?”

“Sure man, come on in.  You want some wine?”

“Naturally!  What’s on the menu, young man?”  Steve was about three or four months younger than myself, but his mannerisms were very much like an old English grandfather from the black and white movies.  He used the grammar and vocabulary, but his accent was American.

“I have a nice Pinot Noir, most of a giant bottle of el-cheapo Merlot, and an indifferent Chablis.”

“Screw-top merlot, I fear.”

“Yes.  Not my first choice.  Someone left it here.”

“The enigmatic Miss Fontaine, perhaps?” he asked, and took a drag on his cigarette.  There was something about seeing Steve smoke that made me want a cigarette too.

“Yeah, I think so.  You divine that?”

“Please.  That cherubic lady is gifted in many ways, but in selecting wine to bring to a friend’s soiree? As the saying goes, ‘not so much.’  Well, let’s have some of the merlot.  At least for starters!”

“Cherubic! Heh heh.  Yeah.  I’ll get the bottle if you’ll get the glasses.”

And so we spent a pleasant half hour talking about normal things, sipping wine, and listening to Miles Davis – Steve’s selection.  Topics ranged from how CDs somehow lacked the richness of LPs, what miracles rainbows were, all the strange French cheeses that were suddenly available now that the tariffs had been lifted, and so on.  I’m sure part of his motive for coming over was just simple loneliness.  Of course, once the wine started warming us up, the conversation shifted to more serious matters.

“My dear Richard, old friend, do you think you could answer something truthfully if I asked you?”

“Why on earth wouldn’t I?”

“I don’t want to put a friend on the spot, of course, so if you’d rather not answer because of a…um…conflict of interest, my feelings won’t be hurt at all.”

“What, like if answering means betraying a confidence or something?”

“Exactly.”

“If you ask me something, I’ll answer it if I can.  If I can’t, I’ll say so.  Fair enough?”

“Fair enough.  You have no ashtrays in this house?”

“That’s your question?!?”

We both laughed.  It wasn’t his question.  Gentleman that he was, he just felt awkward using a saucer for his ashes as a guest.  No, I didn’t have an ashtray, by the way.  Cece used a little bowl of salt for one when she came over. 

Sorcerers, wizards, and their like are big on little bowls of salt.

Steve lit another Misty, and twirled it between finger and thumb, watching the thin stream of little curls and mushroom clouds ascend toward the ceiling.

“It always smells so nice around here.  What are you using - sandalwood?”

“It’s a mix of my own.  Sandalwood’s in it, yes.  Cedar, juniper berries, a smidge of frankincense, and a secret ingredient.”

“Oooh….a secret ingredient!  How intriguing!”

“Steve.”

“I know, I know, and I’m sorry.”

“Look, if you’ve got something on your chest, feel free to let me hear it.  If doing so is making you conflicted or something, then maybe this isn’t the right time.  Either way, it’s fine.  No pressure.”

“No, it’s fine.  I need to know.  I’m just worried about making you uncomfortable.”

“Like I said, no worries there.”

“Very well.”  He paused, took a deep breath, and asked, “Do you think Cecilia has her sights set on Philip?  Romantically, I mean?”

Something in my brain went “SPROING!”

“Good lord, no!  Ha!  That’s what’s worrying you?  Oh Steve, God bless your heart, believe me, I am 100% sure Cece has no romantic interest in your guy.”  I said all of this smiling.  Then had a thought.

“Why do you ask?  Has Phil said something to make you think that?”

Steve shifted uncomfortably in my club chair, “Well, nooo….not exactly.  But…lately…it’s like he’s going out of his way to meet with her, far more than she sends for him.  It makes me wonder…is she putting her whammy on my man?”

I stroked my beard.  “I can’t say that I’ve ever seen her do something like that.  At a bar, maybe.  I’ve suspected her, anyway.  I’ve seen her just sort of give someone a come-hither look and she’ll end up leaving with him…or her.  It’s not easy to explain just based on…um…”

“Her physical gifts?”

“Yeah.  I’ve never felt any chemistry there, myself.  If she weren’t the kind of person she is, she’d just blend into the background of other average-looking people.  It’s that personality of hers…very…what’s the word, Steve?”

“Charismatic.”

“Yeah.  Good enough.”

“Well, Richard, if she’s used a few drops of her powers to pick up one-night-stands at bars, what do you think?  Might Cecilia ever use it steal someone else’s man?”

 I took a deep breath.  I shouldn’t have mentioned the bar story.  “Steve, all I can say, and I mean it, is that although I’m sure it’s probably within her power to do that, and worse, I have a hard time imagining her ever going through with it.  I know Cece comes across as glib and a bit flighty, but trust me, in her own way, she’s deep.  Deep enough, I’m pretty sure, that she wouldn’t steal someone out of a committed relationship to play with them herself.  If you asked her this instead of asking me, I think she’d say there are far too many free fish swimming around to go angling after one that’s already on someone else’s hook.”

Steve wasn’t looking very comforted.  “But Richard, are you such good friends with her that you know her well enough to say that…for sure?”

“Yes.  Remember, I’ve known her a long time.  I met her the summer after you and I met.”

“Ah, Professor Ryang!”

“Yeah!” 

“He never grasped your cheiro-ballista question.  He thought you were asking something about the Chi-Rho symbol.  But Richard…do you not agree that Cecilia is, well, a trifle….dangerous?”

I thought for a moment before replying.  “I prefer to think of her as merely unsafe.”

“Unsafe?!?  What’s the difference?”

“Unsafe things, I guess, are more passive.  Like an icy road is unsafe because, well, just because.  But even if you had an accident on it, the icy road wasn’t out to get you.  Lions and tigers and bears are out to get you.  Sharks are out to get you.  They’re dangerous.  I don’t think Cece’s dangerous, though I can understand why pretty much anyone who’d seen her in action might think otherwise.  She seems like the shark when you meet her, but really, she’s just the icy road.  So, I’ve always felt that having her around was unsafe, but I never felt that she was dangerous.  Not to me, anyway.”

“I do.  Increasingly.  And not just because of Philip.  It’s the things Cecilia and I are practicing together.  I sometimes think I know how a voodoo doll must feel.”

“What?  She sticks pins in you?!?  That’s not really her thing, man…”

“No no…but a voodoo doll is just a tool.  I feel like that more and more.  She’s training me for some big rite, teaching me incantations she says aren’t in any human language, that sort of thing.  That’s all fine.  I did some acting in college, you know, so I can learn lines.  But then there are these guided meditations she does…”

“Ah yes.  Eerie, aren’t they?”

“Very much.  How much did you study under her, Richard?”

“Quite a bit, but mostly divination.  It was the thing that interested me most strongly, and my strongest suit, if you’ll pardon the pun, is the Tarot.  But I can do all of it.  My crystal ball is under a cloth in the walk-in closet I use for such purposes.  But you’re really asking me about the guided meditations, yes?”

“Yes.  What’s that all about?”

“Oh, lots of things.  At the very least, a guided meditation puts everyone who participates in the same frame of mind; hopefully, one that’s conducive to whatever ceremony is planned for the evening.  But that’s just letter A out of a rather lengthy outline.  You want to talk more specifically about your meditation experiences with Cece?”

“Well, is it permitted?”

“Did she tell you not to?”

“No.  Never.  I don’t think she has to, since I’ve no idea really what this is all building up to, so whatever I could tell anyone about it would leave them as clueless as I find myself.”

“Try me.”

“Thank you, Richard, you’re a good friend.”

“What are we here for, if not each other, Steve?”

He seemed more relaxed.  “She takes me to this pretty place in our minds, where we meet.  And there’s a fountain, but it’s not really a fountain, it’s…I don’t know a word for it.”

“I know this one.  It’s a waterfall, but it isn’t falling from anything.  Like a waterfall pouring through a hole in the air a few feet above you?”

“Yes!  That’s it!  But it falls much more slowly than it should.”

“It’s a favorite place of hers to take people mentally.  It’s like a staging area for phase two.” I said, smiling.

Steve nodded, and I urged him to go on. 

“But from there, Richard, isn’t it the same for both of us?”

“Oh no.  Not at all.  When she took me there, she presented me with various bowls of water, and taught me to look into them deeply, so that in the end, I could look into one bowl of water and see out of one of the others – like a window.  That’s how I acquired the skill of skrying with silver bowls of water.  And there were other exercises that opened up pendulums, crystal balls, and tarot cards to me.  I’m sure what you two do there is different from any of this, yes?”

“By Jove, yes!  She offers me a drink from an invisible cup, and then drinks some herself.  Then she pours it all over both of us and we melt – it’s actually a pleasant sensation – into a large basin that we’re standing in.  It looks like the shell Venus stands in in the painting.”

“Botticelli.”

“Exactly.  So we’re all liquidy for a time, then something happens and we begin to solidify as one person, and I’m seeing what she’s seeing and thinking and feeling what she’s thinking and feeling.”

“That must be extraordinary!”

“While it’s going on, it really is quite wonderful.  It’s intimate.  But then through another process, we separate, and when the meditation is over, so is the lovely feeling.  It makes me feel, I don’t know, uncomfortable somehow.  Like I’ve been violated or soiled or something.  Not in any way that is at all hostile or violent, but as if this is all for her benefit, not mine.  I find it…off-putting.”

“Well…It’s not good if you aren’t getting something from it too.  I wonder what she’s up to…”

“Me too, Richard.”

A pensive visit, so far.  I decided to put a brighter cast on the visit and offered to do a tarot reading for him concerning him and Phil, if it would put his doubts to rest, and he accepted.  It was a complicated spread, and I was surprised at how puzzled it left me.  I asked Steve if there was any reason why he was unhappy with himself, since I saw an indication in the cards that his insecurity over Phil had less to do with Cecilia and much more to do with his feelings toward himself.

“No more so than anyone else, I suppose.”

“Please.  That’s no answer, but it’s not really your fault but mine.  I just jumped on you.  Let me ask you this way.  If you could change one thing only about yourself, what would it be?”

Steve was clearly uncomfortable.  His lips were pressed firmly together and he was holding his breath.  He had something to say, but couldn’t spit it out.  I looked at the cards, and remembered what he’d said when Cece had hypnotized him at Violet Bix’s party. 

I had an idea.

“Steve, you know everything you and I talk about here is in complete confidence.  Cece won’t ever know what we’ve said to each other.  Neither will Phil.  So, I think I know what the problem is, and I just want you to let me know if I’m right.  Nod or shake your head if that’s all you can do.”

“Oh, I can usually do better than that, sir!”

“Well, you haven’t heard the question, and it’s a big one.  The question is this:  do you ever wish that you weren’t born male?”

Steve shot bolt upright in his chair, turned beet red, and held his breath.  He actually started sweating. 

“It’s ok, you’re here with me, and you know I mean you absolutely no harm…only good.”

Steve gave me a wild surmise, heaved a heavy sigh, and relaxed.

“I can’t believe the cards told you that.”

“It’s part skill, part art.  A large part is intuition.  Each card means something, and even means something different depending on where it lands, what’s next to it, and so on, but even the best spread is like a paragraph with the verbs missing.  Filling in the verbs is the intuitive part.  From what I see on the table, and from what I know about you and the dynamic of your relationship with Phil…  I’m just wondering.”

“The answer is…Yes.  But it wasn’t always this way.  It started when Philip and I began dating.  Something in me, something in my spirit, knew before I knew consciously, that his relationship with me was very much out of character for him.  As I grew to love him and felt how much he loved me, all I wanted to be was everything he needed in life.  I wanted to be all things to him.”

“But…?”

“But I couldn’t be.  Philip would probably contradict me, but the one thing I couldn’t be for him, that part of him needed, was a woman.  For God’s sake, it’s how he lived his life right up to the minute we met.  Now, every time I look at myself, I’m disappointed somehow, scared somehow, that he’ll leave me for a woman, if not Cecilia, then someone else.  I’ve thought about this a lot, especially as I was falling asleep, ‘Curse my luck for being poured into a man’s body when the man I love can only be completed by a woman.’”

“I don’t think you should feel that way, Steve.  If Phil loves you, and he surely must to have changed his whole lifestyle, then how can you imagine you don’t complete him?  Have there been problems in the relationship because of this?”

“Are you a tarot reader or a shrink?”

“You think there’s a difference?”  I smiled.  This got him smiling too, so I went on, “Look, it says here you and your soul-mate will live happily ever after, though you’ve got some problems to overcome in the mean time.  What the problems are is a bit of a puzzle in this spread, but we can follow up some other time.  One thing that isn’t puzzling is that there’s a clear twist of fate involved in resolving them, whatever they are.”

“But the reading is good?  The cards are good?”

“Better than average, let’s say.  I would love to be able to tell you that you’ll have an easy life of fulfillment starting ten minutes ago, and once in a while I get a spread like that.  But yes, I’d say, whatever you may be going through right now, you kinda need to keep going through it until it runs its course.  Once you’re on the other side of it…smooth sailing.”

“I don’t know, Richard.  I’d feel better if it was more positive.”

“It is positive.  You’ll have your happily ever after, but for the moment…things are just a little bit dangerous.”

“Or maybe, just a little bit…unsafe.”