But it was done, and when my ears quit bleeding, I went and got the earrings and stood before the mirror and threaded their wires through my raw flesh. The wires were thin, and they pulled at the new holes in my ears, and it couldn’t have hurt more if I’d hung a couple of anvils from my bleeding earlobes. But they looked beautiful. I stood looking at what they did to my neck and the angle of my jaw and the way they made the stray twining of my hair seem artful and deliberate. I smiled, serene and inviting, and almost I could see his Silver Lady in my own mirror.
But like I say, they hurt like hell, and tiny drips of my blood were sliding down the silver wires, and I couldn’t imagine sleeping with those things swinging from my ears all night. So I lifted them out and put them back in their box and the wires tinged the cotton pink. Then I wiped my earlobes with hydrogen peroxide, shivering at the sting. And I went to bed wondering if my ears would get infected.
They didn’t, they healed, and the holes didn’t grow shut, even though I didn’t keep anything in them to hold them open. A Friday came when there was a breath of spring in the air, and I put on a pale blue blouse that I hadn’t worn in so long that it felt like new again. Just before I left my apartment, I went back, and got the box and went to the bathroom and hung the silver ladies from my ears. I went to work.
Felicia, my department head, complimented me on them, but said they didn’t look, quite, well, professional, to wear to work. I agreed she was probably right, and when I nodded, I felt their pleasant weight swinging on my ears. I didn’t take them off. I collected my cash bag and went to open up my till.
I worked until six that day, and I smiled at people and they smiled back, and I didn’t really give a damn how much I sold, but I sold probably twice as much as I’d ever sold before, maybe because I didn’t give a damn. At the end of my shift, I got my coat and purse and collected my week’s paycheck and decided to walk out through the mall instead of through the back door. The mall was having 4-H week, and I got a kick out of seeing the kids with their animals, bored cats sitting in cages stuffed full of kitty toys, little signs that say things like, “Hi, my name is Peter Pan, and I’m a registered Lop Rabbit,” an incubator full of peeping chicks, and, right in the middle of the mall, someone had spread black plastic and scattered straw on top of it, and a pudgy girl with dark pigtails was demonstrating how to groom a unicorn.
I looked again, and it was a white billy goat, and one that was none too happy about being groomed. I shook my head, and felt the silver ladies swing, and as I turned away, the fortyish man stepped out of the Herb and Tea Emporium with an armful of little brown bags. He swung into pace beside me, smelling like cinnamon, oranges and cloves, and said, “You’ve just got to see this chicken. It plays tic-tac-toe.”
Sure enough, some enterprising 4-H’er had rigged up a board with red and blue lights for the x’s and o’s, and for a quarter donation, the chicken would play tic-tac-toe with you. It was the fattest old rooster I’d ever seen, its comb hanging rakishly over one eye, and it beat me three times running. Which was about half my coffee money for the week, but what the hell, how often do you get the chance to play tic-tac-toe with a chicken?
The fortyish man played him and won, which brought the rooster up to the bars of the cage, flapping its wings and striking out, and I found myself dragging the fortyish man back out of beak range while the young owner of the rooster tried to calm his bird. We just laughed, and he took my elbow and guided me into a little Mexican restaurant that opens off the mall, and we found a table and sat down. The first thing I said was, “This is ridiculous. I don’t even know you, and here I find myself defending you from irate roosters and having dinner with you.”
And he said, “Permit me to introduce myself, then. I am Merlin.”
I nearly walked out right then.
It’s like this. I’m a skeptic. I have this one friend, a very nice woman. But she’s always saying things like, “I can tell by your aura that you are troubled today,” or talking about how I stunt my spiritual growth by ignoring my latent psychic powers. Once she phoned me up at eleven at night, long distance, collect, to tell me she’d just had a psychic experience. She was house-sitting for a friend in a big old house on Whidby Island. She was sitting watching television, when she clearly heard the sound of footsteps going up the stairs. Only from where she was sitting, she could (she says) see the stairs quite clearly and there was no one there. So she froze, and she heard footsteps going along the upstairs hallway and then she heard the bathroom door shut. Then, she said, she heard the unmistakable and noisy splashing of a man urinating. The toilet flushed, and then all was silence. When she got up the nerve to go check the upstairs bathroom, there was no one there. But—THE SEAT WAS UP! So she had phoned me right away to jar me from my skepticism. Every time she comes over, she always has to throw her rune chips for me, and for some reason, they always spell out death and disaster and horrendous bad fortune just around the bend for me. Which may actually prove that she’s truly psychic, because that fortune had never been far wrong for me. But it doesn’t keep me from kidding her about her ghostly urinator. She’s a friend, and she puts up with it, and I put up with psychic-magic-spiritualism jazz.
But the fortyish man I didn’t know at all—well, at least not much, and I wasn’t going to put up with it from him. That was pushing it too far. There he was, fortyish and balding and getting a gut, and expecting me to listen to him talk weird as well. I mean, okay, I’m thirty-five, but everyone says I look a lot younger, and while only one man had ever called me Silver Lady, the rest haven’t exactly called me Dog Meat. Maybe I’m not attractive in the standard, popular sense, but people who see me don’t shudder and look away. Mostly they just tend not to see me. But at any rate, I did know that I wasn’t so desperate that I had to latch onto a fortyish man with wing-nut ideas for company. Except that just then the waitress walked past on her way to the next table, laden with two combination plates, heavy white china loaded to the gunnels with enchiladas and tacos and burritos, garnished with dollops of white sour cream and pale green guacamole, with black olives frisking dangerously close to the lip of the plate, and I suddenly knew I could listen to anyone talk about anything a lot more easily than I could go home and face Banquet Fried Chicken, its flaking brown crust covered with thick hoarfrost from my faulty refrigerator. So I did.
We ordered and we ate and he talked and I listened. He told me things. He was not the Merlin, but he did know he was descended from him. Magic was not what it had been at one time, but he got by. One quote I remember exactly. “The only magic that’s left in the world right now is the magic that we make ourselves, deliberately. You’re not going to stumble over enchantment by chance.You have to be open to it, looking for it, and when you first think you might have glimpsed it, you have to will it into your life with every machination available to you.” He paused. He leaned forward to whisper, “But the magic is never quite what you expect it to be. Almost, but never exactly.” And then he leaned back and smiled at me, and I knew what he was going to say next.