— I have reservations, I admit.
— Me, too, for dinner. Lighten up, Helen. I have to find Moira before she leaves.
— Who's Moira?
— Moira was the narrator in Violet's thing, I met her in town the last time I was here.
Lighten up. One easy reservation is that I question his sanity, my sanity, and my need to question sanity, a concept I hold in abeyance, then I question his reason, as sanity and reason are often synonymous, which can make for deadly dull days and nights. I wonder who else will join us, apart from Contesa and Moira, that odd inquisitive woman, whose appearance in my life has been accidental, but this encounter will be deliberate, a seance with Moira and unnamed others, but I don't ask the Magician to reveal them, because he might name the demanding man or someone else about whom I'm uneasy.
He wants to meet in the Rotunda Room at midnight, which is in less than two hours, and he'll gather other sitters-a sitting, he informs me, is a seance-and exhorts me not to worry, because he'll make sure they're sympathetic people, and, it's an adventure, he insists.
— Why are you doing this? It's strange. We just met.
— Violet started something in my head, she started me thinking.
He repeats vigorously, his jowls shaking, that he has a sense about me, he explains that he acts on his impulses, because he writes obituaries for a living, and death is in his face every day, and the fact is you never know when you're going to buy it, unless you kill yourself, you never know. He's adamant.
— If the spirit moves me, I just do it. Life is short. Hell, there's no time to lose.
He rushes off to find Moira.
I wish he hadn't said that, No time to lose. I'm in his sights, his excited behavior disallows time's unfolding casually, to be crafted carelessly or by pondering and reflection, but now his impulse crashes into me, so I may have to let things drop or get out of control, I may let myself go or not go but I can't stop, it's hard to stop when something has been set irresistibly in motion. I may want a genuine experience, whatever that is, as everything is in some sense experiential, and also there could be an obstacle I might overcome, I'm mindful of that, and in a curious way a seance, which appears nonsensical, might make sense. Wittgenstein said, "If no one ever did anything silly, nothing intelligent would ever be done." Plainly, it is an accident, a cosmic joke, whatever that means, that I'm in the Magician's path, since our conjunction is unplanned, which idea instantly delights me, its novelty supplants others that raise caution, and my impatience festers, while anxiety blooms. But time drags before the adventure, time to kill, that's all there is, I hate killing it, but I'm not averse to killing other things. I heard about a woman here last year who refused to kill a living creature, who'd taken a vow in a ceremony at the peak of a local, snow-capped mountain, and then allowed cockroaches to thrive and encouraged mice to breed in her room, until there was an infestation of cockroaches and hundreds of mice, since a breeding pair can produce fifty thousand in a year, and the stench and filth required the town authorities and residential staff to remove her forcibly. She is a purist and would not, rumor had it, listen to reason and kill the creatures mercifully, but her ethical position, logical if not reasonable when taken to an extreme, also distinguishes saints, activists, and visionaries. I protect some animals and not others, I eat some and not others, some vegetarians eat fish, most wear leather, to be stylish or warm, most are indifferent to some types of killing, particularly the kind that inconveniences them, and, when a cat I owned turned vicious and stalked me, after employing various tactics to subdue its fury, behavior modification training, exotic music, unearthly sounds, and tranquilizers, I had it killed. If I participate in this seance, it will not be as a purist, but a temporary renegade from categories of reason. I'm free not to submit to the experiment or experience, but experience is what I want, or it is the only thing I have, I'm its sum, a vaporous being, since, like time, it disappears and leaves only memory, which is unreliable and about which I have no choice, and, when I pile up more experiences, I'll have more history that I will forget or inaccurately render, so I'll also be the sum of more regrets and mistakes. It could be the reason not to do anything, which I also do, nothing. I incline toward the new and also bend back toward the old, to an appreciation of history, though in recent years I prefer the study of design, but neither is escapable, and I would like to imagine communication with the dead, my dead friend explaining how he died on a mountain, my father advising me to tell my mother he still loves her, that he didn't want to leave her alone, or that he applauds my quitting history for the study of design and to make or unmake objects. I don't believe or expect any of this, but I'm susceptible to what I don't know or believe, too, since after my father died, on the same night he was taken without saying a last word, a mist of steam or vapor rose and hovered over my mother's body, I watched the little cloud from a chair, because I couldn't sleep, and I thought it was him, bidding us farewell, his spirit having departed his body, leaving just a mistiness, which I don't believe, so then I locked myself in the bath room, read the Farmer's Almanac for 1994, and scrawled lines about dying that in the morning were illegible or made no sense, but uncannily also made sense, since death takes everything, every sense, apart and renders everything indecipherable. If my father visits, I might voice what I couldn't or never did before, but I scarcely can let myself think of the impossible and also don't visit cemeteries, sit on graves and talk to my friends' tombstones, as if they could hear me, though I'd like to believe they do and that if I spoke to them and they heard, it would reassure them of their not being forgotten, that somehow they live in death. But I refuse to talk to a tombstone, I reject its efficacy, reject the fantasy, although paradoxically I acknowledge the truth of the fantastic, since imagination is also knowledge, before it knows itself as useful.
On a serviceable, dark-brown wooden bureau or dresser against one of the walls in my bedroom is an array of creams and potions, to reduce or lessen wrinkles, to smooth, lubricate, or moisturize, to coddle the body and face, and I might relax that way. I watch them, inanimate containers of soothing, energizing hope. New anti-aging creams claim to do as much as medical procedures, these contain pentapeptides, small groups of longchain amino acids that function as medical messengers throughout the body, initially developed to help in the healing of wounds. As part of the body's natural response to helping skin heal, peptides were found instrumental in increasing cells to generate more collagen, and collagen is critical to how the skin ages. My Polish cosmetician sometimes applies a collagen mask to my face, during which I lie under a pink or blue fluffy blanket for at least twenty minutes while it nourishes my skin, and she talks on the telephone in Polish, so that I don't know what she's saying, which is a blessing probably, but because my skin is sensitive, she avoids dramatic changes, oils and creams, treatments that might cause a rash or, worse, hives, or urticaria, but a collagen mask isn't an irritant. It is supposed to supplant or augment the natural collagen I've lost as I've grown older, it's supposed to replenish it and plump up the cheeks, and for some hours after the mask, I believe my cheeks are plumper. She says so, she insists on the beneficial effects of her work, as everyone does, few want to believe that what they are doing is insufficient, ineffective, or actually damaging, parents slap their children in the child's interest, surgeons perform unnecessary hysterectomies, people abandon dependent pets in parks and on streets, because they've become a nuisance, pets bring out the best and worst human behavior, and the Polish beautician believes in her work and in herself, and I do also, since much well-being is facilitated and benefited by a placebo effect. On a rare occasion, when she was nearly garrulous, she told me that she took care of her elderly mother, who wanted her to live with her, which didn't surprise me, that she cooks meals in advance for her, places each one wrapped in aluminum foil in a freezer, when she goes on an outing with her friends, and that every Sunday the two attend church together. She sighed and then patted my forehead with a potion that smelled of honeysuckle. Occasionally I desire an orderly life such as the one the Polish cosmetician narrates, designed with weekly appointments with her mother, by a religious faith and a God who watches her mostly with love and sometimes disapprobation to whom she can confess and by whom be forgiven, by an adherence to discipline, by strenuous outings with like-minded, robust friends, and a regular job during which every day but Sunday and Monday she waxes legs and moustaches, cleans, shapes and cuts nails, polishes them with a full range of brilliant hues and colors, applies soothing masks and salubrious if worthless creams to women's faces, but I can also imagine she dislikes her boss, who is rarely there and who calls from home and gives her orders, who is married and has children, and that my cosmetician also seethes at her mother's strict regulation of her, a woman of thirty-eight, who doesn't want to marry again or have glum men visiting her unasked in her place of work, or who may want their sexual advances, but whose deepest interests or dissatisfactions lie in areas she'd never express to me. Or, she may have none. Next to the creams on the plain, wooden dresser, a crystal ball, a gift from a dead friend, insinuates itself now as an omen.