We Were the Universe (eBook)

Part Two

THE
WATER
WITCH

AT THE BAGGAGE CLAIM, PETE CHECKS HIS fuck app to see about Montana meat.

“Just to get an idea,” he says. This isn’t a meat trip, he assures me, something I hadn’t considered until he said it. On nights long past, before Pete fell in love, before I got pregnant, he would go up to the bar to get us a round and get sidetracked by some hot stranger, a beautiful bear with thick lashes and strong forearms. Pete has a type and his type is himself. He and his distraction would drink both drinks and then, remembering me at last, Pete would drop a consolation shot on the table as he and his twin streamed past, leaving, saying, “Want me to call you a car?”

“Is totally, totally fine,” I’d slur, and mean it. I’d down my free booze, melt happily into the worn vinyl booth.

But this is a different, heartbroken Pete, one who mopes and holds my hand and won’t even look at a hot stranger, let alone ditch me for one. A meat trip! Would that it were so, for his sake.

The loudspeaker says a fishing pole has been left at the security desk. “Please retrieve your rod,” the voice says.

“Did you hear that?” I say, but Pete is lost in his little screen. He flashes me a picture of a penis, a beer can next to it for scale.

“It’s fifty miles away,” he says, and I imagine the dick out there drunk and alone, living a life in the mountains.

We stand with people from our flight, waiting for our luggage, and a silver-haired woman creeps through the crowd. She wears huge wraparound sunglasses and a sheer fluorescent skirt so indecent and stained it seems to transmit her mental state. She clears her throat and stands at the head of the empty, spinning conveyor belt. Everybody listens to her shouted pitch, no choice in the matter.

“Good evening, sirs and madams. You are about to hear a story of great import,” she begins, cementing the fact that absolutely nothing important is coming. I look for her home base—maybe a setup with an old Casio and some maracas, a stack of Bibles or a couple marionettes with human hair. People avoid eye contact with her and each other, keep tapping on their phones, but I’m compelled.

This is exactly the type of person my sister would have paid attention to. Julie talked to everyone. She was in love with the overheard, the random, the incidental. She collected strangers—regular, boring people like cashiers and delivery drivers and somebody out walking their dog, but she especially loved the touched: oddballs and yellers, the paranoid, the very religious. People like this elderly, scantily clad storyteller. She loved their bizarre logic and glaring blind spots, their abysmal advice. They’d hook her with a gesture or phrase, and she’d begin to live in their damaged lives with them. This tendency was a byproduct of Julie’s worst choices— she dredged up bad characters with a social net cast as wide as her addictions—but there was something sweet about it too, how tender and attentive she could be to those in trouble.

The loud woman weaves through the crowd, her story full of odd ideas and impossible dates, precise weather.

“Low cloud cover,” she says. “Winds southeasterly and we’re born with only one fear—falling.” Her cadence, her looping insistence—she reminds me of my mother. “I hit a bit of a snag,” the woman goes on. “We will never be contained as we were in utero, perfect and free from want.”

This loose story culminates in an announcement: the woman is a clairvoyant water witch and she wants to read everybody’s palms. There it is—the grift!

“Give me anything long and I can find water with it,” she says. “Anything can divine. It’s not about the stick. It’s not!”

Even though we’ve heard most of her bit, by the time the Water Witch gets to Pete and me, I let her take it from the top. I know what it’s like to be a waitress rattling off specials, wanting your customers to shut the fuck up. “Of the utmost import,” she barks. She goes on about the exquisite embryos, the wind and the clouds, August fifty-second. Then she hits her snag—back to the womb we go.

“Guess what?” is my mother’s favorite refrain, an indication that what follows is a total waste, something I would never have the capacity or desire to guess, a cue that now would be a great time to mentally check out, spend a few minutes examining my cuticles, maybe try to recall the B-sides of some of my favorite records.

“Guess what? Chimineas are better than fire pits,” she called me early one morning to insist. “Who wants to sit on the smoky side of a fire? Nobody, that’s who. With a chiminea, smoke goes straight up. Guess what you can burn in one? Birch or cedar or pine needles. Oak. You can get you a Skeeterlog. Can’t burn plywood. You shouldn’t burn chipboard.” She was picking up speed. “Pinyon or applewood, fine. Not newspaper. Stained woods—bad. Hickory? Hickory’s okay.” She would have categorized the whole world like that if I’d let her: safe to burn or not.

The Water Witch has a similar narrative tic, projects it in a similar grating tone. The connection between divining water and reading palms is flimsy, but I’m not surprised when Pete puts his phone away and presents his hand to her. His fragile state has primed him for just this type of con. The Water Witch’s mouth has the folds women’s mouths get, folds like my mother’s, my future folds.

There’s a loud buzz and luggage rises and tumbles from a gap in the wall. I watch the circling bags, appreciate again my powerful choice of a bright duffel—hot green, I call it, there was no delicate celadon option at the thrift store—even though Jad and Pete and everybody who sees it says how god-awful it is.

“I’ve got this,” I say, not that Pete makes a move anyway.

Off the track I jerk his boring black bag and my magnificent bag—“Gree!” a boy a little younger than Gilda exclaims—and toss them in a low arc. Traveling without a child is euphoric in its ease, even the annoying parts. Give me a slow security line. Give me a flight hung up on a tarmac where all I have to do is sit.

“Once, I was perfect,” the Water Witch is saying. “And then I was born.” Same, I think. The way she cradles Pete’s hand—I’m not sure if she’s disturbed or addicted or just lonely, not that those things can’t all coexist.

“Spectacular,” she quietly mutters, studying Pete’s palm. We lean in to listen. “You got a lifeline longer and thicker than any I ever seen,” she says. Pete gently bumps my hip with his. She says he will live to be ninety. He’ll make money and then he’ll make even more money. Of course he will.

“What a beautiful life you have ahead of you,” she marvels. “What a beautiful line!”

Pete stares at his palm, maybe searching for some sign of Brian. A blood blister, a splinter. “Anything else?”

Pete claims he wants a Brian-free future, but a lot of his behavior feels like conjuring to me. Heartbreak isn’t so different from falling in love, how you can’t shut up about a person. You search for them everywhere, point them out in transparent obsession.

Pete once took me to a happy hour—a full hour in which he did not stop talking about his amazing new relationship— and when some violently caloric dessert was brought to our table, he exclaimed, like a profound reveal, “You know who loves chocolate? Brian!”

“How unusual,” I said. “How absolutely noteworthy.”

I was no better. In my early days with Jad, I passed a sweaty jogger on the street and had an erotic flash to that morning, Jad above me, panting open-mouthed while we fucked. That guy breathes like my boyfriend, I thought, labeling Jad as such for the first time, trying out the commitment in my mind. Ridiculous. What a rare and beautiful coincidence, another respirating creature, kindred being with a mouth hole.

“You should try a standing desk,” the Water Witch says. “Sitting is ruining everybody’s spines. Like you.” She points at me. She mimics my bunched shoulders and caved-in chest. It’s so mean and uncanny I instantly respect her. Joke’s on you, I think. I don’t even own a desk. She coughs and hocks, works a gob in her mouth.

A distracted man knocks into her with his rolling suitcase. “My bad,” he says, friendly and unfazed, but the Water Witch glares at him as he glides away.

“You people,” she says. She pushes out her tongue like she’s tasted something terrible.

At this, Pete presses his hands together, gives the Water Witch a little bow, ready to be free of her. She asks gruffly why any of us are here. I don’t know if she means Bozeman or the baggage claim, but Pete’s already got his phone out again, is checking on our rental car. “Nature,” he says, not looking up.

“Don’t bother going down to Old Faithful,” she tells us. “It used to be something.” She says the pressure has been failing, we’ve missed the best of it by years. “Now it’s just—” She squeezes her fist and pumps it at her crotch, a frantic little...