Lessons Of Jaysome

The problem with being a magician is that it is often not a problem at all. The universe bends to meet your needs, the magic a bonus on top of that. For those who need money, The Bank provides it. Or the fae, in my case, because there are debts and balances and no one, especially not the fae, want to see what Jay would do to get money if he didn’t have an unlimited credit card.

There are perks to being ‘Honcho’ to an eleven year old from Outside the universe who could unbind everything if he tried to. The small, nondescript office I’m standing outside is the flip side of that. Even to magicians, the house seems like a normal home converted into a few offices. I can see it is really a thick stone tower connected to one of the fae castles at the edge of the universe. It remains an office even so.

A door appears and opens before I can touch a wall. The fae that comes out looks human enough; I can see through fae glamours put on places, but fae can still hide themselves if they try. This one is.

“Hello. I am here about Jay.” I pause while the fae visibly pales. “His credit card.”

“Your pardon?”

“I’d like to know what he is spending his money on over the past two days. Please. And how the credit cards work.”

“You did not ask before?”

“They are an arrangement Charlie and Jay made. But I am asking now.”

The fae blinks, eyes unfocusing for a moment. Then tells me. I thank them and walk away, reach out. Magic. Need. Will. Desire. And the bindings Jay has with me. I take one step, another, and the third has me half across the city to where Jay walks out of an apartment building with a huge grin.

“Hi, Honcho!”

“Kiddo. What are you up to?”

“I’m doing jaysome!”

“Instead of just being jaysome?”

“Uh-huh! Did you know that food stamps aren’t just stamping food in stores when you leave but! people need them for food?!”

“Ah. Yes.”

“And lots of people need food and a Jay eats a lot Honcho!”

“I do know that,” I say dryly. “But you can’t buy it for people on your fae credit card, Jay.”

“Huh?”

“Sometimes there are recessions where a lot of money is lost; money that would have existed if not for a recession goes on the those cards. And using up too much money would cause another.”

Jay blinks, mouths the word recession. Feels bindings. Begins to understand. “Oh,” he says, in a very small voice.

“But every time you eat, you pay for food. That money goes to people who spend it, help themselves, each other.” I reach out and poke his belly. The growl that responds has more teeth to it than he does when he’s a jaysaurus. “And you have to look after yourself, and eat for all of you.”

“Oh!” He grins, slams into me with a hug. “I’ll do a supper now,” he says happily, vanishing in the middle of the sidewalk. Almost no one notices, simply because people do not vanish in the middle of the street.

I call Charlie to warn her Jay is liable to be at the hotel room for food soon. And then reach, through the bindings I have with Jay, and gently – oh, so gently – mute his understanding of recession. Because if Jay understood how economics worked, I am certain he would do things only he could do. And he would live with them, because he was jaysome. But others might not.

I let out a low breath after. Some days – some days all I want to do is let Jay fix the world. And every logical reason why he shouldn’t grows less and less with each year that passes. It is the duty of magicians to protect the universe against threats from Outside, and there is perhaps no greater threat than kindness without understanding.

But even so. Even so.

DARE to be Jaysome

Charlie almost kicks the door in on the magician’s motel room. And it has lots of wards, cuz Honcho is really good at them, but Charlie is really good at being Charlie too!

He walks out of the motel room in his robe for sleeping even if it’s way past sleeping and yawns. “Charlie. I was up late trying to fix –.”

“This.” Charlie shoves the gift at him like it’s not a gift at all. “What is it?”

“But I told you –,” I explainify.

“Jay.” Charlie says my name in a way that makes me kinda hide for a bit!

Honcho considers the gift. “Well, it looks like Jay was given a dog biscuit. Which turned into something else.”

“He told me it is LSD.”

“Oh.”

“Jay. On LSD. That warrants more than an ‘oh’ magician!”

“Kiddo.” I appear beside Honcho, who looks at me like a magician and pokes bindings and everything! “How are you?”

“I’m not sure? Cuz I got LSD from Dogmeat, who is a DOG and that’s close to LSD you know!”

Honcho pauses. “Ah. Continue?”

“And I had it and everything cuz Charlie said jaysome was a drug and coffee isn’t and sugar isn’t if it is and I’m really confused and I found out that lots of stuff is in nature like belladona and poppies, which are also –.”

“LSD isn’t found in nature, Jay.”

“But it comes from bread, and you can use morning glory seeds and ergot and –.”

“So you made some and took it?”

“I think so, but I wanted to be sure so I gave some to Charlie and she brought it to you and kicked your door a lot!”

“I did notice that.”

“And! she hadn’t even tried it yet.” And I totally sulk like a Jay.

“Magician,” Charlie says carefully.

“I imagine it is LSD.” Honcho shrugs. “But this is Jay, who is tough like a Jay. That includes poisons, and things that aren’t poison at all. Which means it did nothing?”

“I saw less bindings than normal for a second, and that was it!”

Charlie stares at the biscuit, then at me. “And you figured it would be safe for me to take this?”

“I figured it was a lot more boring that jaysome, and you’re used to jaysome,” and I offer a hugey grin as Honcho starts laughing.

“That – that is – right.” Charlie lets out a sigh. “That is a very good point, but it might be safest if you never do drugs again. Please,” she adds, and there is even a binding in that!

“I won’t at all when I’m eleven,” I say firmly, cuz I can’t bind my future-me’s like that too much.

“Good,” Charlie says, and then crumples all the LSD in her hand and says we’re going to have a normal adventure now, and I might have to apologize to people?!

Which is pretty weird cuz I didn’t do anything at all!

Back To Basics

The world takes its time waking up on a Saturday morning. People grumble their way out of bed or fling themselves into the day in a despairing attempt to not lose all of two precious days off from work. I am not in either group even if I was up early. The air is cold as I continue to walk through the town, snow and rain teasing each other with promises in the air. The local coffee shop didn’t open until seven and I was the first in line; I’ve been back to refill my coffee twice, walked the streets of the town once in that time.

On the surface of it, there is nothing here for me. No creatures from Outside trying to enter the universe, no monsters hunting down tender food, no magicians not yet come into their nature or understanding. But there is no place that does not need a magician. Sometimes the weight of that truth almost buckles my knees.

There should be other wandering magicians. But there are not, perhaps because the story of me has grown too deeply in the past five years, and in the time before that as well. Fifteen years as a magician leaves a mark on the world deeper than I like to think about. I have faced impossible odds in my time. I’d like to think everyone does, but the stories of mine don’t need to grow with their telling. Sometimes I won because I was clever, or knew one thing my foes did not. Other times I had the right allies, or I was stupid enough to do things I should never do.

But a wandering magician is for wandering. For helping places without magicians to call their own. Everything else isn’t important next to that. I didn’t pay attention to the name of this town as we entered it, but I have come to know it. Angers surge under calm waters, everyone drowning in things they think they understand. Pressures grinding together like cultural tectonic plates. I work magic as I walk. Shifting pain, moving hurts, lessening griefs. Not balance, but change.

To be a magician is to walk a world of small miracles and gentle secrets. To be a protection for the world, yes, but that is being a magician. The magic is about need and desire. I shift needs, meet desires, gently hint toward other paths for people to take. No one will know I’ve been here, no one have any reason to suspect magic is real at all. My coffee refills itself without my having to return to the shop. I give the coffee to an older man who needs it, return anyway.

Two children are reading news of the wider world on their phone, trying to hide fear from each other. I turn their fear into a ward about myself, weakening it enough for them to see through the other a little bit. A few jokes become something else, their voices shaking. The least I can do is stop people from being islands. There is nothing save pain along that path, though it took me years to understand that. And, too, there is pain along every path. But sometimes not as much when one has others to share the journey with.

I leave a generous tip as I walk out. There are homes scattered out past the edge of town, and I hitch a ride toward them. A small conversation with an older man suspicious of me without knowing why. I fix the suspension in his car when he lets me out, thank him and walk away. Some things can’t he helped with magic, especially if they can. I walk and meet desires with needs, meshing places and people together until my coffee grows cold.

It’s a couple of miles back to the town, and I wander through the woods toward it. Helping the forest directly, giving aid to some animals, keeping company with a slumbering elemental for a time. There are things I have to do, futures growing up ahead of me like inevitabilities but sometimes going back to basics is the most important thing one can do. I relax, and the magic does what it needs to and for a time I can pretend I am anything other than another magician doing what I can to make the world a better place in my small ways.

Dog Days Of Jaysome

“Magician.” I walk into our hotel suite. “Jay isn’t in his room and he didn’t answer his phone.”

“I know,” The wandering magician says calmly.

“Then where?”

“Last I knew, he was being a wolf?”

“A spirit animal for @madworlddiary. Because Jay.”

“There are consequences for acts of jaysome.” He sighs. “He’s in the pound.”

“And you’re not getting Jay out?”

“He has to start learning, Charlie.”

“That might not be the best place to teach Jay.”

“And any place is?”

“Shit.”

*

I enter the pound before it is open for the day, stilling alarms with a faint trace of magic.

Jay isn’t in a cage. There isn’t a cage that can hold a Jay, even if he’s being a JayWolf. He has used bindings and opened every lock, changed back into his human form and is just talking to animals. There is nothing Jay can’t talk to, sometimes because it simply never occurs to him that he couldn’t. And most reply, not wanting to disappoint him.

“Honcho.” He doesn’t look back at me. There is slightly less enthusiasm than when he normally says my name as he turns to me, all eleven, from far Outside the universe and looking both baffled and hurt. “You did a binding so I couldn’t leave this place last night.”

“Kiddo. You got captured.”

“I was having an adventure!”

“Yes. And sometimes they lead to different sorts of adventures.”

“But but all these animals don’t have families and finding some for all of them is pretty hard and –.” He hiccups. “Why?”

For a moment, I think he understands: why I’ve been forcing him to understand the consquences of his actions and power, why he’s been having to fix up his own oopses and accidents.

“Why what?” I ask, and it takes everything I have for my voice to be even. Some day I will hurt him more than I ever want to hurt anyone; I don’t want it to be today.

Jay scratches his head. “Why lock them up when they’re just having adventures too?”

“Sometimes adventures can’t overlap with the adventures others have, Jay. And sometimes people are just very confusled and trying to help the best they can.”

“I try and help a lot!”

“Yes. Yes, you do. And you being safe in the pound overnight was a trying to help you. We can’t take them with us.”

“But we have a really big hotel room,” he protests.

“Yes. And are leaving for another town today. But I asked the fae, and they’ll work some glamours and do what they can.”

No one wants to disappoint Jay. No one wants to be the one to break that hopeful, helping innocence even if the power behind it is beyond anything they understand.

He beams, following me outside and I pretend I don’t notice the bags of treats that appear in every cage.

The Garden of Peace

I’m almost at the grocery store when it stops raining. There were probably other clues. The world is littered with omens hiding in amens. (I wrote something kin to that last night, the idea having stuck with me.) I ponder a scene for The Empty Book about how every amen is really an ‘aw, men’ with various inflections and how Sara would present that to Brodie. I’ve lost myself in the peace of making fiction for a moment, but the moment passes when the sidewalk turns into dirt.

I stop. Blink. There is no parking lot ahead of me, the shopping bag in my pocket almost laughable. I am in a field of plants taller than I am. Sunflowers are walking around on pebbled paths. Wheat sky scrapers fill the air to my left. I don’t recognize most of what is here.

“A garden full of weeds.” I pitch the words to carry. Wait.

“Nope! Gardens only have flowers,” and Jay is in front of me, glaring up. All 11 and so jaysome with it.

“I thought that might get your attention. Jay. I’m getting groceries. I’m writing part of a story later. I don’t have time for – for this?”

“Everyone has time to be more jaysome. J is J, you know!”

Creating fictional characters is one thing. Having them try and help your own life is something else. “Where are we?”

“This is the garden of peace, where the flowers you pick are inside you and it took a lot of time to find!” He grins, huge and beaming, and every flower turns toward the feel of it.

I can feel sunlight and warmth, the gentle sounds of rain and earth. There is peace here: not a thing to be attained, but a tranquillity that simply is. Everything moves in harmony, every pattern a binding. Only no one else is here.

“Jay. Why did it take a long time to find?” I say slowly.

“Oh, it was really far away from Charlie and Honcho and even you and I had to move through lots of universes to find it. But this place is all about jaysome and you can be extra extra jaysome here!”

I sigh. “Jay. I am jaysome enough in my own life, I think –.”

“Nopes! Because you wrote stuff last night about a dad hurting his son a lot!”

“... that is fiction, Jay. It’s not real.”

“But I’m fiction too, only I’m the real kind!”

“So every fiction I write should be jaysome?”

“Uh-huh! Since otherwise it might lead to people being not-jaysome, and that would be really bad-face!”

“But we have to embrace our nonjaysomeness, or how else do we find our jaysome?”

“By being jaysome,” Jay says, letting out a definitely hugey sigh. “Man. This is going to take a lot more than the garden, won’t it?”

“I – no, this is fine,” I say.

“We can go into the centre of the garden.” And the world ripples. There is a door. It is hungry and cold, and not a thing that is part of a garden of peace at all.

Even Jay pauses at the door.

“What is beyond that?” I ask.

“Oh! There is a glass marble in the middle of the garden and! if it is rubbed in a certain way it causes a happy memory to be remembered! So you can run it and keep jaysome!”

“And this door protects it?”

“Uhm.”

“Jay.”

“It is also maybe protected by three Jayseltosche’s but! if they give it up it’ll work jaysomely!”

I take a deep breath. “There is only one Jay. And if these are – piece of you in the future, you don’t want to meet them.”

“But that’s an adventure! Wow! You really only like fake surprises, don’t you?!” Jay demands.

“No. But I know real ones aren’t always the kind of surprises one wants to have.”

There is a sound on the other side of the door. Movement. Voices. Power. Dark matter itself will be one of the parts of Jay in this room. Himself when he is older another. I don’t know what the third will be, but I know it is something Jay won’t be able to understand. Being jaysome is what he is.

“They are guarding a memory, Jay. And they need it more than you need this adventure, and far more than I need a false peace.” I am not the wandering magician. I am nothing like Honcho, but I’ve written his adventures long enough to mimic what he would say.

“But but but!”

“Jay. These are Jayseltosche’s, which isn’t the same as Jay at all. None of them are eleven, and you would be too much jaysome for them. You are their Achilles Heel, and you’d only hurt them. Jaysome can hurt too, even if you never intend it.”

“I know.”

And he does know that. I don’t when when he learned. I take a deep breath, move away from the door.

“Jay. This stone, this marble. It’s not going to help.”

“But if you remember lots of happy things you’ll be more jaysome!”

“Your story won’t change. I am writing it. I know how it ends.”

“But but I’m helping you be more jaysome!”

“Oh, you are. Believe me. But your story is a stone thrown in a lake, Jay. For every bounce, it still has the same trajectory. And nothing that ends can be without sadness.”

Jay says nothing. He begins to circle me, looking at me, into me, through me.

“There will be ripples, when the stone lands. Adventures and wonders and so much jaysome,” I say quickly, stumbling over the words. “But there is still an ending, Jay.”

“Nope.” And he says that with a certainty that causes even the marble to crack. I can hear that from outside, because the door is open a crack. Somehow I missed that earlier.

“You’re the third Jayseltosche.” Jay does not move. “If you were really Jay, there is no way you’d have avoided the adventure of entering the room. Where is Jay?”

“Away from here. You are right about him. He would destroy even a garden of peace, because jaysome is more than peace can ever be.”

“I know. I was being careful not to wonder about that. The stone won’t help.”

“You will destroy me. And you are not sorry?”

Sometimes Achilles Heel isn’t as worrying as his Hell. “Change isn’t always destruction. Stagnation isn’t jaysome,” I say, as gently as I dare to.

And I am somewhere else. A garden, this one breathtaking in colour and scope and Jay is bouncing through it and grinning from ear to ear. The garden is everything the door was not, and that’s all I want to say about it.

“Look look look! I found some fakesurprise, and cruxy and mox and some feverfewm and admiraljane and an ellenya rhyming vine and bet you’re totally hanging on in quiet –.”

“I get the idea,” I say before Jay can find every single person he follows on tumblr.

“The fake surprise is really funny since sometimes it has real ones?!”

“Well, every story has jaysome hiding inside it. Or it wouldn’t be a story at all?”

And Jay grins at that in delight, snags my hand and returns me home.

Sometimes one has to be meta in order to survive.

I have no idea if I did a good thing today. Or a bad one.

I suspect I’ll never know, no matter how many stories I write to try and understand.

The Achilles heel of the author, that stories always go places where even we cannot follow. But I think I can find some peace with that, and continue to get groceries.

Jay does not return with another adventure to help me be more jaysome.

I think that means I am safe, which I realize isn’t a jaysome thing to be.

Ooops.