22. Beautiful Symmetry
22
BEAUTIFUL SYMMETRY
Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.
— JONATHAN SWIFT
W hen we pulled up to the trailhead at Oswald West State Park, the same place where I had been caught surfing just a few days before, but instead of going down toward the beach, I led Jonathan to another trailhead that wound around the cliffs, and then up the Neahkahnie’s north side to the summit. The sun was making vain attempts to persist through cloud cover, but the cold and damp February air required layers. I had been able to find enough things appropriate for a hike: a baggy red fleece that used to fit my high school swimming shoulders, a pair of ragged hiking boots, and a wool beanie that reeked of juniper berries. On top of that, I wore my father’s old Marine-issued poncho that flapped around my hands and reached nearly to my knees.
Jonathan was dressed in casual clothes and a Barbour jacket, but in contrast to me, he looked as if he had walked out of a catalog instead of a rummage sale. Even his Gore-tex pants seemed neatly pressed, hardly making a sound as we padded up the soft dirt trail.
I set a decent pace on the switchbacks, and Jonathan followed easily. Slightly annoyed—did he have to be good at everything?—I picked up my speed, balancing on my toes against the steepening incline, practically jogging up the trail. It suddenly seemed imperative that I get to the top of the mountain as soon as possible, and definitely before the sorcerer behind me.
“‘She lives in storm and strife,’” he murmured as one branch slapped me in the face.
“You’re a Yeats fan on top of science and the law?” I asked.
His eyebrows rose. “Everyone should be a Yeats fan.” He nodded toward the ocean. “It fits.”
“Right,” I said. “But you’ve got it all wrong.”
“I have?”
“Of course,” I said, breaking off a lacy frond from one of the great evergreens we passed. “Cedar, not oak. And no one here is looking for a proud death. We’re looking for life.” I smiled and tossed the frond at him.
He took it and smiled back. “So we are.”
I picked a few leaves off a salal bush growing from an ancient cedar stump and tucked them into my pocket except for one, which I popped into my mouth. The bitter taste made my lips pucker slightly, but I chewed it to a paste for a few minutes before spitting it out.
“What was that?” Jonathan asked behind me. “It looks like a heather, but it’s different from the sort that grows in England.”
“Salal leaves,” I said. “Good for cramps.”
I glanced over my shoulder, prepared to smirk at the cringe most men wore when menstruation came up. But Jonathan’s face was placid.
“You’re indisposed?” If anything, he looked confused, like he should have known.
“No, I just get a fussy stomach when I’m stressed.”
The winter clouds had returned, but so far the worst we faced was a mild wind and misty rain. A downpour was always possible, but that was what the raincoats were for. The air felt heavy and vigilant, and there was no one on the trail but us.
“This place is strange,” Jonathan remarked behind me as we wound around the massive trunks and dormant ferns. “Something happened here.”
The trail was wet and muddy. Our feet squelched loudly with every step.
“This mountain has a long history,” I said, stepping over a fallen fir tree. “The Tillamook named it after Ekahni, which is either the ‘supreme god,’ the fire god, or an incarnation of Coyote, the trickster, depending on which story you read. I think the last two make the most sense. The mountain tends to play tricks on people.”
“How so?”
“Spanish gold, for instance.”
I could feel Jonathan’s eyes nudging me in the back, urging me to continue.
“There used to be shipwrecks off the side of the mountain,” I said before hopping over one particularly muddy patch. “The wind would blow them right onto the rocks, and they couldn’t see the mountain at night. Legend says that one of the ships carried bullion. And that when the Spanish brought it ashore, the captain killed a slave to protect it with a ghost, and then hid the gold somewhere on the mountain.”
A loud snort emitted behind me. “And I suppose people are still searching for it. Fools.”
Vaguely miffed, I wondered why he should be so condescending about a myth that, by all local accounts, could very likely be true. I, of course, had it under good authority from Gran that the mountain held absolutely no memories of the event in question, but he wouldn’t know that.
“Well, the most anyone has ever found is a few gold coins and some wax, more likely dropped by travelers during the nineteenth century than a Spanish pirate centuries earlier. But still, you never know.”
“Yes, you do. You know as well as I do that sort of thing leaves marks on a place,” Jonathan said. “You grew up here. You’ve never Seen evidence of the story yourself?”
I pushed aside an empty alder branch and looked back at him. “I’ve Seen a lot of things on this mountain. But no pirates.” Something else occurred to me. “What would you See? Ghosts? How can sorcerers See memory at all?”
“Ghosts exist,” Jonathan said as if he were simply acknowledging the fact of the tree we had just passed. “One would be obvious to any sorcerer who cared to look.” One side of his mouth tilted up when he watched mine drop. “Yes, sorcerers can See things too. In our own way.”
“I thought you could only manipulate physical elements. How would you be able to sense a ghost?”
We continued walking side by side as the trail opened up a bit. Jonathan was silent, and when his shoulder brushed mine, I caught whispers of his thoughts. He wasn’t sure exactly how to describe what he knew; he had never been asked to explain how his power worked before.
“Well, how do you See?” he asked finally.
I scratched my chin with a gloved finger. “It’s different for other seers. They usually describe it like perfume. Memories are like a fog that settles, or maybe a mirage, but only when they seek them out. Thoughts can take all sorts of forms—people think with all their senses. For me, it feels more like water that flows through everyone and everything people have come into contact with. Their thoughts and emotions and memories are the water, and bodies and places where important things happen are the vessels. And then I touch them, it’s like we both turn porous. Everything flows through.” I tipped my head. “Or maybe I’m the water, and I flow through them. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.”
“That explains why you enjoy surfing.”
I smiled. “Perhaps you should try it sometime.”
I felt, rather than saw him shudder behind me. “Freezing temperatures with carnivorous fish. I’ll pass.”
“Sharks aren’t fish.”
“They swim in the ocean and have fins and gills. The difference is nominal.”
I swatted another branch out of my way but allowed it to snap back behind me in response. Jonathan caught it neatly like nothing had happened. We continued to walk in silence, and I grew more and more irritated by the fact that he had successfully gotten more information out of me without offering any of his own. Again.
I stopped and turned to face him. “What do you mean by that?”
“That sharks are unequivocally fish-like?”
I rolled my eyes. “No. What did you mean by ‘that explains why you enjoy surfing’?”
Jonathan cocked his head and examined me for a moment. “I thought it was because of where your people are from—the coast, Ireland—but now I See that it’s the water that runs through you. Sensing the world—the real world—the way you do, it’s no wonder you feel most at home surrounded by ocean. It’s your kin.”
As he spoke, the mist turned into a drizzle. He reached out slowly with one hand to wipe off the drops of water gathering on my cheek, letting them fall from his fingers one by one to the ground. Glimmers of his curiosity seeped through my skin. Curiosity and something else I couldn’t quite name, but felt glowing inside me too, warm and beckoning.
“Yes, I See it now.” His eyes shone, iridescent even in the muted light. “Your energies are the same, you and the water.”
We stared at each other, green eyes into blue, until the rain faded back into the forest. I broke the trance first, turning to walk up the trail while he stayed behind, the firm press of his eyes pushing between my shoulder blades.
“It’s obviously not the same energy I See,” I called behind me. “You still haven’t answered my question. What do you See?”
His boots squelched in the mud as he jogged to catch up. “Did you ever take chemistry?”
“Once, a long time ago. Electrons and periodic tables are about all I remember.” I glanced back to find him smiling. “It’s been a while since ninth grade.”
“Do you remember balancing equations? Where you have to move elements around until there is an equal amount of them on each side?”
I nodded, vaguely remembering something like that. Not that I could have explained it in any shape or form.
“The important thing to get from that is that at their heart, all elements—all things, beings, etcetera—are fundamentally made of the same thing. Atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, particles, sub-particles. All the same at their core: energy.”
I nodded, though he could only see the back of my camouflage raincoat hood.
“You ask what I can See,” he continued. “That’s what I See. It’s as if I can open up a part of my brain and See certain types of energy, just as you can See the energy of thoughts and feelings and past. I See how the physical world is composed, the way it’s structured. And, if I know the right words, I can communicate with it too. That’s all a spell does, you know. Asks some kind of energy to do any number of things…reveal itself, hide or disperse, rearrange to appear as something else, even bond with another to become a whole new form.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “If it’s all true, how could I have the same energy as water? Wouldn’t everyone? I’m a human being. We all have a lot of water running through us. Eighty percent, right?”
“Energy is a lot more complex than just the elements. Much more fluid. More dynamic, if you can believe it.”
“I wish I could See it,” I said. “I’d like to See what you See.”
“Would you?”
As soon as he said that, we rounded up the last switchback and found ourselves on a rocky part of the trail where the trees opened up again. Not the summit, but the highest we could get without climbing the rock and mud ascent to the peak. A view of the Manzanita Beach stretched out below us, visible through some of the trees. A crescent-shaped strip of beach that guarded the town from the water threatening to swallow it up.
“Come here.” Jonathan beckoned with an outstretched hand. “Will you take off your glove?”
I swallowed, then did as he asked. He did the same.
“Promise not to probe?” He was joking, but there was a clear undercurrent of sincerity in his request.
I raised a doubtful brow, and he blinked, over innocent, making me laugh.
“I promise,” I said. “Well, I’ll try not to, anyway.”
“Fair enough.” Jonathan grinned, green eyes glittering. His face appeared to be lit from within. “Close your eyes.”
He took my hand. Immediately my vision was filled with Manzanita Beach. But instead of the seascape I had just Seen, it was as if the lines of the land, the ocean, the beach, the town, everything, were moving, constructed by ambient, multicolored, microscopic lights that twinkled in utterly gorgeous chaos. Certain parts seemed to be dominated more by some colors than others. The ocean, for instance, was full of every blue imaginable, while the forest glittered with immeasurable greens.
“Oh,” I breathed, taking in the prismatic world around me.
Slowly, my perspective— his perspective—turned, and the tiny particles became more fluid and more stable as we examined the larger objects around us. The rocks on the ground were darker, glimmering grays, somehow less mobile but never fully still. The trees, on the other hand, were more fluid as streams of other particles drifted through their branches. Many of them had a slow pulse, as if they were asleep.
Then Jonathan’s gaze turned on me. I was, in a word, a rainbow, with some particles constantly moving, others more still, like the rocks. A definite tinge of brilliant cerulean pervaded my system, which seemed to be even more fluid than the trees, moving with the rhythm and time of the waves below us. I gasped and watched as the energy of oxygen coursed through my lungs and filtered through my bloodstream as, in turn, my nose released other, changed energy of carbon dioxide.
Gradually, the particles began to dim, and I registered the effort that Jonathan had to exert in order to See the world that way, much less make requests of it. Eventually, our surroundings faded to their normal self: a mixture of the earthen browns, dark greens, smoky grays and slate blues of the coastal climate. The world I knew.
Jonathan dropped my hand, and my regular sight returned to me.
“Wow,” I breathed. “Oh, wow.”