WHAT DO YOU CALL IT?

A Story by Hawksmoor

What is the True nature of Magic?

One day, if you could call it a day, and by most people's definition you really couldn’t, a great, limitless cloud of sentient energy and thought, which would be called God in many different tongues and dialects, broke wind.

This solar wind was expelled from light year long guts and innards that were made of what human beings would later call magic.

And the Universe was born on a wave of magic methane gas and hydrogen plumes.

Billions of years later, Earth came into being due to the effect that takes place when gravity becomes extremely selfish and wants to have all things to itself.

September 12th, 1966.

New England, Main.

1764 Covington Street.

Two friends sat opposite each other at a large wooden desk that had been placed in the room at the back of the upstairs hall when the second set of occupants had first moved in. The desk had been put in the room until a permanent storage place could be sorted out. Maybe the basement, or perhaps the attic; a stale, smoke smelling, cobweb strewn place that, even when the attic window was opened to let a breeze in, didn’t smell any less smoky or stale. The desk was an antique, a hundred year old homemade concoction of cherry wood and cheap plaster that was now peeling and falling to the floor in chunks every now and again. The whole thing was topped off by a glass top.

The two teens who sat at the desk were friends, a young man and a young woman. Between them were a Chemistry text book and several sheets of lined white paper. The man, who was of dark skin and long, slender arms and legs, snorted and stabbed the center of the text book with a long finger. "We'll never get this s**t, Alicia. We won't get this s**t, and as a result of not getting it, we'll both fail Chem. I, and then we might as well drop school altogether, because, well, who gets out of Millar High School without passing Chem. I? No one, that's who. Requirement my a*s. Who uses this s**t in everyday life, anyway?"

"The people who run NASA use it pretty often," said Alicia. Alicia was very pretty. She had short hair, a slender waist, full lips and wide eyes. Alicia was smiling, and a #2 pencil waggled up and down through her teeth when she spoke. "I don't give a damn about that," said the man. He stabbed the center of the text book again. "What do I care about a bunch of eggheads who care more about what names there are left to give comets than saving life on this planet? If I don’t pass this class, and high school, I won’t have the time to worry about comets, quasars, f****n quantum strings or anything else. I'll be too busy being dead. If I don’t pass, my dad will beat the living s**t out of me." There was an ugly frown on his as he spoke, and the frown didn't get any less ugly when he stopped talking.

Alicia's smile, meanwhile, had graduated (no pun intended) from a cracked thing to a full grown grin. She stared at her friend and classmate with half opened, cheerful eyes.

"You see? You hear yourself, Paul? I think this is the reason why you can't get a girl within a thousand feet of you. You're too dramatic to be a decent boyfriend. We ladies want all the drama to ourselves. You've always sounded like you should have been born a character on a daytime soap opera." The grin was very wide now.

"Shut up," said Paul. "What do you know about it anyway? You haven't dated in a year, and it doesn't look like you've got fellas lining up to have your bra size and panty brands, you know." Now, Paul was smiling his own leering smile.

"That's strictly because I've chosen not to engage in any more carnal relationships until I've found the one who I'll be having a carnal and emotional relationship with for the rest of my life. You see, unlike you, I've got a choice. Loser."

"Funny," sneered Paul, the smile falling away from his face in an instant.

"I think we need a break from the studying for now," said Alicia, who then lifted the papers beside the text book and placed them inside the book, which was then closed. "Ten minutes."

"Great," said Paul. "A ciggy would be good. Calms the nerves, you know." Paul pulled from his back pocket a box of cigarettes that carried a brand name that would not exist in five years' time, plucking a cigarette from amid the cluster of them and placing it into his mouth. He then reached into his shirt's right breast pocket and drew a wooden match. With his thumbnail, he popped the match alight and held it to the cigarette's opposite end. The end of the tube of dried tobacco smoked and glowed to life.

Paul inhaled, held the breath for a moment, and then exhaled a cloud of silver-blue smoke into the room. There was a smile on his face that Alicia knew couldn't be moved by anything short of a lightning strike.

"Those things will kill you one day," Alicia said, waving a hand before her face with a grimace and a wrinkle of her nose.

"Who wants to live forever anyway?" said Paul. He blew a perfect ring of smoke at Alicia, and then blew a thin blue line of smoke through the ring, which hung in the air in front his friend's face. Alicia watched this with some interest, but when the smoke wavered and faded from sight, Paul saw that she was not impressed.

"Oh yeah?" Paul said, looking out the bedroom window and into the dreary, rain soaked day beyond. "You do better, then." Disgusted, he sat back in his seat and folded his arms across his chest. The cigarette smoldered and sent lazy lines into the room's atmosphere. Outside, someone honked a horn. This was followed by the screech of tires on asphalt. There was no crash to be heard

"Ok," Alicia said, getting up from her seat and holding out her right hand. "I've been reading up on a few things, and I was planning to show you this anyway. Give me the cigarette."

"You still don't understand that bullshitting a bullshitter hardly ever works out," said Paul. A faint ghost of a smile hung on his face. "You don’t smoke."

"Just give me the damned thing. You won't miss what I take, and even if you do, it’s not as if you haven't got a whole arsenal of the things in your pocket. Hand it over. I'll show you something that you'll never forget. Hell, I may even teach you a few things if you're good and follow my directions. Now, the cigarette, if you please. I want to show you this so we can get back to failing Chemistry. Before we begin to pass it."

Now, Paul's face was no longer cheerful. Now, his face was tight and concerned.

"You know a way that we can pass this class, eh? Rubbish. Pure f****n' rubbish and radishes."

"The sooner you hand over the cigarette, the sooner I can show you what I want to show you." Her hand hung in front of Paul's face. Paul shrugged his shoulders and held the cigarette out, which his friend took with a quick and deft hand. Alicia smiled. "Now, I've got to ask you to hold any applause and shouting for afterwards. I've only ever done this twice before, and I still don't totally understand how I'm doing it, so it may not even work."

"Cop-outs are for the losers who need 'em," said Paul.

Alicia ignored the taunt and focused on the cigarette in her right hand. And then she began to talk.

"For the past year, I've been reading up on pseudo-science and mysticism. Nathan Hill's 'Too Many Mysteries.' Adam Kiln's 'Secret Way of The World.' Lisa Koogan's 'True Nature of The Universe.' These books have many arguments against each other. Methods, ways, practices, and techniques. Reading them, you'd hardly think that they share anything at all in common. But they do share one thing in common. They all state that we live in an eventual universe."

"What?" said Paul, who, despite his obvious confusion at what his friend was saying, was now leaning forward in his seat with his elbows resting on the desk between them.

"An eventual universe. Meaning that nothing is impossible. Meaning that anything and everything is possible. Meaning that anything and everything has happened or will eventually happen. They all say that it’s all about thought and focus. You might call it, I don't know, for lack of a better term, magic. Watch." And then she waved her left hand over the embers of the dying cigarette and closed her eyes. Nothing happened. She waved her hand over the cigarette again, but still, nothing happened.

Outside, an ice cream truck was chiming out a shrill tune. Why an ice cream truck would be trolling the streets after a brisk, miserable summer rain was beyond any answer that Paul could come up with at the moment. Alicia waved a shaking hand over the cigarette again, and again, nothing.

"Look closer," she said, her eyes still closed.

Paul leaned in closer and strained his eyes to see anything at all.

"You're full of..." he said, and then he saw something.

Each time Alicia waved her hand over the cigarette, it smoked a bit more, a bit more lively, a bit more wildly. As Paul watched, with each wave of her hand, Alicia added length back to the cigarette's formerly spent end. The damned thing was somehow replenishing itself. Each time this happened, the smoke would drift more quickly into the room's atmosphere.

"How...how are you doing this?" Paul said, transfixed. "How?"

"Shut up and keep watching," said Alicia, her eyes still tightly shut. "I'm not done yet."

She stuck the end of the cigarette into her mouth and inhaled. When she exhaled, a thick cord of solid smoke poured forth from hr mouth and twisted around her head in a spiral. Paul watched, stunned. The smoke spiral rose, elongated, and took the form of a double helix. A DNA strand.

"With every blink you blink," Alicia said, "with every breath you take, there's what you might call magic in it. Every step you step, every word you speak, there's a world of potential eventuality staining an already stained world with more of what you might call magic. We live in a mystery-filled world that throbs and revolves in a mystery-filled solar system that exists in a mystery-filled galaxy that spins and shapes and collides in a universe that's filled with this same mystery. The mystery is almost never solved by human beings, but every now and again, it is." Though she'd only inhaled once from the cigarette, the thick cord of smoke continued to stream from her mouth.

Paul stood up and stepped back. His eyes were wide and glassy, and he unconsciously took a cigarette from the pack in his back pocket. He popped a thumbnail against another wooden match and put the second cigarette into his quivering mouth. Not that it would have done much to calm his frayed mind or nerves.

And still, Alicia talked and talked and talked.

"Koogan says that God started out as a creature of pure thought and possibility. She says that in the evolution of sentient life, through the evolution of sentient life, that God has changed. She says that we've changed Him with bad words and thoughts and actions. She says that all of what we call magic has been sapped out of Him by us, by His creations, and that we use this force for our own selfish means. She says that God watches us with jealousy and contempt. He watches us with jealousy and contempt because we've got the potential and ability that He gave to us, but no longer has. We've stolen it from Him, a little at a time, through the ages."

The living smoke that still jetted from her mouth was ever-extending, ever-changing. One moment it was a double helix that twisted up and around Alicia's head; the next, it was a hoard of silver-blue butterflies that soared around the room in the way that butterflies soar, unbalanced and shaky. The next second, the smoke had become a thick grove of trees that spouted up from nowhere in the air, leaves blowing in an absent wind, roots reaching for the floor of the room.

Paul could hear each fallen leaf as it see-sawed its way to the floor.

"Kiln believes that we all have the potential to harness and use this magic for our own means. He referenced Hitler's power with speech, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s effortless persuasion and usage of passion on the masses. He spoke of Christ's healing and preaching, he spoke of the Wright Brother's understanding of the air currents that traverse the planet. Good and evil are but paths that we choose with the skill and key of this magic. Kiln says that we are pure thought made solid with a powerful belief in the fact that we are nothing more than bodies of meat, muscle, and bone. He says that we have trapped ourselves in the prison of the physical body and the physical world because we don’t believe that we have in us what God once had."

Paul's cigarette jutted from his right mouth, untouched, save for the lighting of it. His eyes were glassier now, and as he watched the phantom trees of smoke change into a herd of grazing Cape buffalo on the African Serengeti in the blazing sun, a single tear slid down his right cheek.

"We can do anything," he whispered. "We can do anything, but we won't do anything that's worth a damn because we are trapped in a state of suspended disbelief. We have no faith, and for that, we are doomed."

"Bingo," Alicia said.

Outside, the iced cream truck sailed off of and far beyond Covington Street.

The silver-blue smoke that entered the world as Alicia spoke changed yet again, this time into a mini solar system that hung in the air before them. There were nine planets, a dozen moons, an asteroid belt, a sun. As Paul watched and Alicia paused, the solar system shrank, becoming a mini galaxy, bright and spinning and sparkling. The galaxy shrank, replaced by a mass of silver, towering beams of a cloud-like substance. Within these objects were sparkles and blinding shifts of light. This, in turn, shrank, and the smoke morphed into a massive, staring eye. The eye was colorful beyond words, not bright silver, as everything else had been up to that point, but truly colorful. Brilliant. Indescribable.

"All that, all we are," said Paul, whose cigarette smoke, now that he noticed, was streaming from his own unsmoked cigarette and mixing and building with Alicia's, "all that we are, everything we know, is only an eye? A single eye of God? This is madness. We don’t matter at all."

"Oh, but we do," said Alicia. "We are of God, and even that small part of Him is important. We are of magic's origin, you see." And then the smoke faded away. Both cigarettes died, and then there was silence.

Alicia exhaled and sat down. She looked exhausted.

"My mouth is so damned dry. I need ice cream."

"Truck is long gone," said Paul, who absentmindedly stuck his cigarette back into the pack and laid it on the desk. He was still in shock, but not so much in shock that he didn't know what to say.

"Teach me," he said, breathlessly. "Teach me to harness it. Teach me to do magic. Teach me to breathe it and live it and walk in it. It's beautiful. It's terrible." His hands were shaking on the desk.

"I can't teach you anything," she said. "You have to teach yourself. You have to believe that you can catch it, the underpinning of everything. I know enough to know that you don't believe, even now that you've seen what you've seen. Tomorrow, you'll wake up believing that you smoked a little too much pot and had a bad dream with me in it. I told you. Even I don't totally understand how I'm doing it. I just believe I can do it, drudge up the thought that I want to project, think of what I want to know or see, and then, well, then it happens."

"Damn it," said Paul. He stared at the surface of the desk, silent.

"My mouth is f*****g parched," Alicia said. "Could you do me a favor and get me a glass of cold water?"

"Sure," said Paul, rising from his seat as he spoke. He walked to the door of the room, opened it, then turned around and stared at his friend, who'd be his girlfriend in a month, his fiance in a year, his wife in three years, his ex-wife in three years. Ten years after that, they'd give it another try. Twenty years after that, she'd be a widow. Alicia had seen this whole affair unfurl before her in the fishbowl on her windowsill a week before showing Paul what she'd shown him.

"What's it called, Alicia?" said Paul as he looked at her, his eyes shining, his lips trembling. "What do you call it?"

Alicia smiled and walked over to the open window to look out on the world. Her hands were on her hips and there was a look in her eye that hinted that all was right with the world.

"I call it magic, Paul. I call it magic."