The tea was still scalding hot. Wizard sipped at his noisily and then attacked the food. The heat of it alone was comforting to his abused body. The skillfully blended textures and flavors nearly went unnoticed in his drive to fill his belly with something solid and nourishing. Lynda silently replenished his mound of rice from the container. When his cup was empty and the food nearly gone, she produced a short, stout bottle with a flourish. “Plum wine!” Her eyebrows leaped at him- She poured, and as the liquid filled his cup, the bouquet of it saluted his nostrils. Memories of hot orchard summers drifted back to him.
When her cup was filled, they drank together.
He took his in a series of tiny sips, letting each moment of taste flow and ebb over his tongue. When his shivering finally ceased, he sighed and let the tensions go out of his shoulders and back- “It’s good, isn’t it?” she asked, breaking into his reverie. He nodded slowly and felt his own smile break free.
She returned it, and began to busily stack up the disposable dishes and flatware. Wizard let her. She left the bottle of wine on the table at his elbow. He refilled his cup. He slowly sipped wine and stared into the candle flame. It was a long, still flame, steady and unflickered by any wind. The dazzling of its light reminded him of sunlight on the bright surface of a mirror pond. If you looked at it one way, it could dazzle your eyes and blind you. But if you tilted your head and half closed your eyes, you could see your reflection in the black water. Like a darker self looking up, mocking. And the more you looked, the less it looked like you. Until, finally, if you stared at it long enough, it didn’t look like you at all, or anyone else.
“Well, he don’t look like no wizard to me!”
Rasputin did a slow gyrating turn in his dance to his own unheard music. Wizard stared at him in awe. Cassie had dragged him up here, making him walk for blocks past me border of the Ride Free area. They stood now on a sidewalk in the midst of the Seattle Center. Grassy hillocks and imposing buildings were everywhere, along with ducks and fountains and the Pacific Science Center and the terminal of the monorail. He was dazzled and confused by it all, and especially by the lofty spire of the Space Needle. Cassie had told him all about the World’s Fair days here in 1962 as she had hurried him along. He had been bored at first by her recital of facts and numbers but soon had become engrossed in the bits of city history she spewed out so casually. Yet she had not brought him here to view the Space Needle or the Fun Forest Amusement Park or even the ducks. She had brought him here to present him to Rasputin.
And Rasputin doubted him. Wizard did not doubt Rasputin.
He was as impressive as the Space Needle. He was close to seven feet tall, and as black and shiny as anthracite coal. Not content with his natural stature, he had increased it by dusting his afro and painting his nails with glitter. Dangling earrings swung heavily from his earlobe. He wore a sleeveless shirt in the sweat of July, and his arms were wound with snakes of silver and eels of copper. His pants were raggedly cut-off Levis, and little chains of bells decked his ankles. His huge feet were bare and he danced. He danced always, every second. Even when he stood still to talk to Cassie, some tiny movement of wrist or ankle or neck or finger kept the dance intact, one continuous flow of motion. Wizard marveled.
“Nope. Don’t look like no wizard, don’t act like no wizard, don’t even smell like no wizard.” Rasputin made the litany a part of his dance.
“There’s wizardry and wizardry,” snapped Cassie. “A fountain doesn’t look like a still pool, but they’re both water.”
“And I am the fountain!” laughed Rasputin in a voice as deep as the sea, but brown. “Leaping and splashing and flashing. You gonna tell me that you’re the still pool, shining back a reflection, soft and green and slimy on the bottom. You gonna tell me that? Are you a wizard, man?”
Rasputin’s eyes were not brown- They were black, blacker than his skin, and they crackled. Wizard flinched from their spark. “I’m not sure yet,” he said softly. “Cassie says I am. I don’t much feel like it- I’m not looking for power.”
“Aho!” Rasputin leaped and whirled. “Not looking for power.
Then you are starting at the right place, man. ‘Cause the magic doesn’t give power, it takes it. And it can’t make you strong, but it can find your strength. Can find your weaknesses, too.
Sounds doubtful, Cassie, but maybe you got one this time. Let me see his hands.“
Wizard held out his hands, palms up, to Rasputin. Rasputin slipped his large pinky-black palms under Wizard’s hands, moving them slowly and carefully as he studied them. Wizard’s hands became a part of Rasputin’s dance as he manipulated him. Slowly his own hands became strangers to him under Rasputin’s scrutiny. They looked like pale fish. His fingers were long and thin, but the joints were large, like knots in skinny twigs. Odd little scars on the backs of his hands were like little landmarks in strange terrain. Suddenly Rasputin’s hands flashed from under Wizard’s to slap his palms with a loud clap.
“He’s got the hands, man. The man’s got the hands. Got the power in his hands. Power-handed man. He’s got the power in his hands, and in his eyes he got the Nam.” He had danced a shuffle-footed, hip-wriggling dance all around Wizard during his chant. But at me last line he stopped and stood still as his black eyes waltzed right into Wizard’s soul. “And in his eyes he got the Nam, man,” he whispered. Wizard stood steady.
The afternoon was hot and still around them, the blue sky cupping them under its sweaty palm, holding in the secrets Rasputin whispered.
“Know why there ain’t been so many wizards, lately? Know why? I got a theory, brother. Got myself an idea about that.
Back in the Middle Ages, them Dark Ages, they got plagues and battles and poverty and tyrants as far as the eye can see.
Know what else they got? Wizards. That’s what makes us, man. Gotta take a man with nothing else left; then you can make a wizard out of the leftovers. That what you got to have to make a wizard. They got the Black Death, and we got the Nam. But one part of my theory I don’t got done yet. Maybe we’re all wizards, see, but you got to have a Nam to wake it up. Like a catalyst, see. And maybe we all came back wizards, but only a few of us crazy enough to know it. Or maybe only a few of us can be wizards, but it don’t develop without a Nam. Like steel. We got hard in the fire, and wizardry is the cutting edge we put on ourselves. Other guys melt, other guys don’t even feel the flames. Not us. We feel the flames and we hurt until we’re hard. And we come back and we cool down, and then—wizards! What you think. Wizard?“
“I don’t know,” Wizard replied foolishly.
Rasputin danced away in disgust. “So you got a wizard, Cassie- You got an I-Don’t-Know Wizard. What the hell good is that kind? What does he do?”
“He feeds the’pigeons,” Cassie retorted. “People know they can talk to him, and he listens to them. The Truth comes out of him. And sometimes he Knows. Isn’t that enough?”
“What do you do?” Wizard, made bold by Cassie’s defense of him, dared to ask.
“I dance!” Rasputin retorted loftily. “And that’s enough, the way I dance. While I dance, I keep the bogey-man away. You got a bogey-man, I-Don’t-Know Wizard?”
Wizard shivered. “There’s something gray,” he confessed, and the summer air turned cold-