We hold on

That cool summer in Montreal every affect fell flat. Every encounter with the world felt provisional. I was waiting for the results. The clinic had been clear enough about the window. Elliot sat across from me at a small table near the window of a café near the bookstore where I worked part-time. He ordered for both of us. The coffee came in thick white cups. Outside the traffic moved in its usual rhythm. Inside the air held the faint taste of air-conditioner and Hertel floor cleaner. For young aristocrats such as ourselves, this leant authenticity.

He asked how long it had been. In my mind, I said from what the clinic had told me I had ten days to two weeks to go. In a world where I had said it aloud, a world where it were the sort of thing we might have discussed, he would have nodded and looked at the surface of his coffee as if the answer itself might surface there.

In our world, in my actual world with Elliot, he was asking how long it had been since I had seen her, my friend from my high school days, when most of my friends were not to be found at school. There was the club set and then there was the Wiccan set. She was of the latter. Most of my friendships had already drifted away from the school halls by then.

He was asking about Zoë. I was telling him about the afternoon previous when she had stopped by the bookstore unannounced just as I was ending my shift. We had gone for coffee to catch up. We had sat in these self same chairs at precisely this table.

It had been four or five years since I had seen Zoë-with-an-umlaut, as I had helpfully insisted on calling her. She would invariably correct me. It was a diaeresis, she would say, not an umlaut. To which I would explain, which hardly sounds healthy, let alone better. As I’ve said, I said to Elliot, she had come into the bookstore on St. Catherine just as I was finishing my shift the day previous by happy accident. The last customer had bought a used copy of something on planetary hours and left without a bag. I locked the register and we had walked here. Here being this hole in the wall with a Pepsi fridge by the register.

As it happens, With An Umlaut and myself had met years yet earlier at an event at Café Thélème. I was seventeen. She was, I think, sixteen. The gathering had been organized by the people who called themselves the mainstream circle, the ones who wore black cotton robes and spoke of balance and the wheel of the year as if the phrases themselves conferred the moral high ground. An’ it harm none, they would say. Zoë and I shared an interest in the cards and the stars and the older books, but more than that we shared a slight arch distance from our entire performance.

We left that night with the dancer and the waitress. The dancer was my height but muscular, clean shaven in the morning with a beard coming in by five. He kept a two-bedroom place in the Plateau with his boyfriend. The waitress worked nights at Lux. She would come home at dawn, exhausted by too much coffee and the tips you make on a plate of fries nursed by two or more teenagers. Together they had begun a smaller group, more strict, more hermetic than the public ritual of the mainstream circle. They called it a groupuscule, this after the waitress’s indefinite sociology degree in progress at Concordia. They had taped a pentacle on the hardwood of the waiter’s second bedroom and called it the Temple. The tape was black electrical tape, the kind you find in any toolbox.

Elliot interrupted my recollection. Who are these people, he said. What were your parents thinking? There, I said, my parents were scrupulous in leaving us, my siblings and myself, to sort these things out as best we could. To my mother at least these teenaged explorations were no surprise whatsoever. She had seen the notebooks early. I had announced my decision to study the old arts at the age of seven, keeping a Spider-Man notepad into which I copied spells culled from the comics, the ones with Stephen Strange and from the one who called herself Mighty Isis. The lined pages filled with words that promised control over weather and distance and the body, the world itself. Aren’t you the odd bird, Elliot said. And here he had been wasting time at that age on the track and in the gym, learning how to make conversation and hold eye contact and such like.

You mock, I said, but then so did Zoë and so did I at the time. Such was postmodernity before I had learned its name at McGill. We maintained this attitude even after a particular afternoon at the dancer’s place that might have led us to conclude our skepticism was not entirely justified.

We were at his place in the Plateau some afternoon his boyfriend was at work, whatever he did for a living. The sun came through the living-room window in literal rays, I could hardly make it up. The partial canopy of the trees from the second floor broke the light into gently moving bars. Motes of dust hung there, almost still in the air. Practically a William Faulkner novel, with Zoë and me sat on the oval braided rug in the dancer’s living room.

She was a beautiful girl, half French, half Ukrainian, the source of her mischief not entirely clear from this knowledge. The dancer and the waitress were in the Temple setting things up, hush hush. The rest of our serious circle had not yet arrived. We decided to meditate. We took up a quiet IAO, the vowels drawn out low so as to sync ourselves without interrupting the preparations behind the closed door.

Our eyes closed. Or rather hers were closed when I shut mine. The sun rendering the insides of my eyelids a glowing field of orange-red. At which point I felt myself rising from the floor. I was cross-legged in the old style and somehow floating.

This is where I have lost you, obviously. Nobody was more mildly surprised than myself. I did not open my eyes. A mild surprise again. I had not set out to do the old rope trick, let alone without the rope. I wondered what was happening but did not want to interrupt the process. Did not want to break whatever had begun. I moved my right hand from my lap where it had rested with the left, reaching out and down to inquire into the space beneath me. I might have been three inches off the floor. Carefully, I switched my fingers into the empty air. Here it became clear Zoë had not kept her eyes closed and I would not be able to continue my investigation uninterrupted. Her voice came sharp, even judging. Why are you levitating? she wanted to know. That was Zoë. No preamble.

This was quite enough for Elliot. He interrupted again. And I am expected to believe any of this? I do not expect you to believe anything, I said. Neither about this nor about anything else.

You were on something, he continued. That afternoon or the night before as we both know that would mean earlier that morning.

I cannot speak to the night before, I said. But if you insist on believing anything I say, believe me I would be just as happy if we had been enjoying hashish or anything else just as entirely innocuous. This is not like a comic book, Elliot. Substances do not make you believe you can float from the floor. But if I had been on something, on anything, in my case it would have been the antihistamines that might have done it. If so, I would be grateful. I could write the whole thing off and it would hardly be worth mentioning. The trouble is precisely that I cannot account for the incident so glibly.

I do not remember if we shared the moment with our hosts. By the time they emerged from the Temple I had long since returned to the floor and With An Umlaut and I had turned to something else. We were rarely entirely forthcoming with either the dancer or the waitress. As much as we enjoyed and appreciated them both, we had some skepticism as to their methods. We had left the larger circle in the first place because we were after the real thing, not years of training in the basics and all the public ceremony. We were looking for magick.

Did you ever find it, Elliot asked. Well this is just the thing, I replied. You would not believe what she told me in our catch-up yesterday.

Zoë sat across from me in that same café, the one off St. Catherine, not the more downmarket yet more glamorous Café Thélème where we had met all those years before. She has cut her hair shorter than I remembered. She said she had been living with a man who worked with metals and the old remedies. Her man had told her to take silver for the lethargy and the depression that came in the dark months and she wondered if it would work with the same efficacy this cold summer.

Are you Pisces, she asked me as she could not quite remember. Zoë was still a Virgo. And are you single, she wondered.

She had met her metalworker in a passageway between one gathering and another, a Ren Faire or some such where sometimes people find the next room to open. He had said they were alike and she was beginning to believe they were.

They had passed through tunnels underground, she said, through great empty spaces of stone and mill and well. In the light and in the dark spaces. In the spaces between people and what ailed them. She might have been listing the contents of a drawer. The man had a way of placing silver under their tongues. He claimed the metal remembered the body, held the shape of what ailed it. She said she had learned to wait with him. The arrangements of their days were simple. Morning light through a high window. Evening when the air cooled. She had come to the bookstore that afternoon because she had seen my name on the schedule in the window and wanted to know if my floating had ever returned.

I told her it had not. It hadn’t in those days. I told her I no longer waited for it. She smiled the old smile, the one I remembered from the Plateau, and said that was probably for the best. The real thing, she said, turned out to be the holding out for what worked consistently. The silver. The tunnels that led nowhere special. The mere knowledge that the body could lift and then return to the floor without explanation held no particular consequence without its return.

Elliot listened to the rest without comment. Outside the window a woman pushed a stroller past the café. The child inside wore a cotton hat that had slipped to one side. I noted it to no particular effect. The light continued its slow decline into the afternoon. We finished our coffees. Mine had gone cold. The test results would come in a week or two with whatever they might have to conclude. Nothing I could do about the timing. The narrative we imposed on the days would hold for a while longer. Zoë had left the café first the day previous, walking north toward the mountain. I watched her until she turned the corner. I have not seen her since.

Elliot paid the bill. We sat a few minutes more in the fading light. The air-conditioning unit in the Pepsi fridge clicked and fell silent. Zoë had said we were still alike, I told him. I did not know if she was right. I had said nothing about the rugby player or the rite of passage underway to her anymore than I had Elliot. The city went on around us. The coffee cups sat empty on the table between him and myself. I had said nothing of consequence regarding my floating act actually underway, the one between the heat of a moment and its outcome at the clinic. The actual spell was a matter I could not name at that table. Not for the last time, our conversation had nowhere left to go, not to the one place I wanted and would not allow. Elliot and I left the café together and went our separate ways. The street the same as always.