Imagine for a moment, if you will, the difficulties, the sheer and simple effort of what I undertake for you. I mean, dough in a box on your window-sill, sure; boiling a lock of hair carefully collected from your barber’s floor, no particular problem. (And did that keep you up at night? Yes? No?)
Oh, good.
But anyway: So you light a candle at midnight, and then break it with a hammer. So you light another, and bury it. Weave more hair into a bird’s nest. Scrape a growing branch, and introduce the hair into it; watch, as the bark covers it over.
Try writing swear-words on consecrated wafers and feeding them to a toad, sometimes. Try burying that, alive.
I bury bottles and vials along paths we used to walk, knowing that where your foot touches them, disease will sprout. I bury an old glove I found in the back of the closet, stiff with the dust of your absence, and wait for it to rot. Drive rusty nails into your footprints. Shove hairballs from the neighbor’s cat under your porch steps.
I contemplate breaking in one morning after you’ve run out of the house without flushing, late for an early class, and thrusting a red-hot soldering iron into your toilet.
In a magazine ad for condoms, I found a couple who look enough like you and her to qualify, and I cut them out, tore the picture down the middle. I gave her part to the only demon I could find—that perpetually drunk and crazy guy on the corner of Church and Wellesley. The other I keep safe, inside my pillow.
It gives me dreams, which I then send to you.
I sow dragon’s teeth. I seed the clouds. I plow my broken heart in secret, in silence.
See what grows.
* * *
Here is how it works, then, for those who wonder:
Magic, white or black, operates on a principle of sympathy. You make an image, identify it with the person (usually by giving it that person’s name), then destroy it. Fast or slow.
Patience and impatience, running in tandem. One action wears the wall between us away. The other cauterizes it. Dulls and dims your understanding of the wo
und’s fatal nature, so it takes that much longer for you to die.
And the other part is, the person has to know. Which is why I’m writing you this at all.
At least, that’s what I tell myself.
* * *
Day Ten. Of what month? My TV’s broken, and all the paper boxes I saw today were empty.
I go to bed, early or late. I get up, early or late. I open my eyes in grey darkness, a pall so dim it almost qualifies as light. The clock is just another liar, and every hour is the same.
I’m so tired.
Guess I’ll just have to take a key to my palm, jagged edge down, and cut myself a whole new lifeline.
* * *
By the way: I hope she breaks your heart. I hope you break hers. And then I hope the two of you sit around thinking about it, all the time. Crying for no known reason at your place of work. Ringing in items with everyone watching. Because don’t fool yourself—you did it once, you can do it again, and somebody else can do it to you.
So don’t you ever, don’t you ever tell yourself again you’re just the nicest little boy in the world.
That’s two cherries you broke on me, you weak motherfucker.
* * *
Day Eleven.
My mother called this morning. I could feel it, somewhere in my stomach, the way cats always know when it’s going to rain. But I couldn’t call her back, because I’ve forgotten where I hid the phone.
Spent the day sticking flowers full of pins and lighting black candles, letting them melt down into malleable puddles of wax. I fumigated the house with all the evil odors of Mars, with sulphur and asafoetida. Staple-gunning yet more copies of that condom ad to my walls, torn so that your face no longer points toward her. Saying: