They're Only Gonna Call You Once
“They’re only gonna call you once, so… you need to make sure you’re ready.”
It’s snowing outside the bar. Snowflakes swirl thick under the yellow light of the street lamps. A gust of wind almost knocks a man down in the street.
“Yeah, of course. That’s fine,” I nod, and sip my beer. I mean it.
“But like, they’re not gonna try you twice, so…”
She’s insistent because she’s taking a risk. I know that.
“Cora, I promise I’ll be around. Ringer on. I’m not working until the weekend so I can be at the apartment all day.”
“Apartment” is a bit of an exaggeration; I’m living in a windowless room in a basement on Clinton St., but it has a hot plate for a kitchen and the water pipes keep it warm, often offensively so. It’s illegal in every respect to building code, I’m sure, but good luck finding something else in the Lower East Side I can afford.
Cora’s wary about introducing me to “the Farm.” This is still a new thing, us dating, but it’s gone well so far and she’s a big proponent of “radical transparency,” telling me that first night about her ghost plant medicine practice, the spiritual awakening she’s been undergoing since we’d worked together at the Ludlow, what was it, six years ago? About her “unorthodox” means of income now. It’s refreshing, being with someone so unabashedly themselves. And her Mancunian accent… it just fucking melts me.
“Hey, it means a lot to me that you’re connecting us,” I assure her. “I don’t quite know what to make of it, honestly, but I don’t take that lightly. And I won’t… like, embarrass you, or whatever…”
“Oh gawd,” she laughs endearingly, very Manky. “No, no, I know you won' embarrass me. It’s just… I want you to know what you’re gettin' into.” Her enormous, sparkling dark eyes are so… direct.
“Oh, nothing ominous about that,” I grin.
“A little danger’s excitin’, though, yeah?” Her eyes warm to mine.
God, she’s gorgeous. Gawd. Her black hair falling carelessly down her shoulders and to the small of her back, her bee-stung full lips, the thin lines of the tattoo peeking up from her black turtleneck and curling up behind her ear…
“With you? Yes, very.”
“Dead good,” she says.
I’m utterly charmed.
—
I don’t know yet if I’m ready to “go Upstate” with these people, but it means a lot to her, so the least I can do is pick up when they call the next day. On paper, okay, yes, it sounds a bit like a cult. But what the hell else am I doing with my life right now?
I’ve been back in New York for two months now, having escaped a collapsed relationship in Los Angeles just in time for an unusually long polar vortex in the East. The place where I’m staying has a futon, blank drywall, my duffle bag’s worth of clothes and some books I’d always felt guilty not having read: East of Eden, my dad’s old copy of Metamorphosis, and a friend’s well-meaning but irritating gift, When Things Fall Apart. They now prop up the lamp and a dirty coffee mug on the milk crate that serves as my nightstand.
There’s an honesty to the challenge of this city and the enormous effort it requires from its inhabitants. As long as I’m sweating at night in this room and not freezing outside, as long as I can go to screenings at Film Forum or IFC, and walk under the buildings in these freezing temperatures, I’ll be fine. A monastic winter of the soul.
At least that's what I’d thought until I’d run into Cora on the street again that one strange, freezing evening, both of us in our old neighborhood, and the serendipity of our encounter sparkled throughout our conversation like golden threads. We chatted quickly, surprised and happy to see each other, and laughed easily on the street corner until our ears hurt from the wind, and then yes, she did have time to get some ramen with me and suddenly three hours had gone by, and we were drinking at a place she knew nearby and I’d skipped a screening of Le Cercle Rouge and then a later one of Black Panther because I was suddenly embarrassed to tell her I’d been planning to watch both of them alone, and any desire to continue my noble isolation melted like so much sidewalk slush in spring.
She’d sat directly opposite me, chest forward, legs uncrossed, unconsciously (or maybe consciously) stroking her black hair back behind her ears; her body was unguarded and open, and her eye contact was so… intense. Searching, but calm. Like she was fascinated and eager to see into me, and her dark eyes glittered and I kept wondering to myself, “was she always like this?” She was drinking an Amaro Nonino because she remembered that one time years ago when I poured her one on the job for her to try, and there we were, rooted in vague, friendly memories of each other, and laughing at our word play, and she was teaching me her Mancunian accent and I kept trying it (and failing) and she kept laughing with me and she was very, very beautiful.
On our second date, we’d taken taken the ferry back from a friend’s art opening in Brooklyn. The night wind had whipped white caps on the East River and the skyline illuminated the underbelly of the low-hanging clouds. She told me about the cycles of death and rebirth she’d experienced through her practice Upstate.
“It sounds like you’re in a death cycle now,” she’d said, her hair caught in the wind. “I think it’s like, leavin' LA has been a death of sorts for you, and now, you’re rootin' in the cold, and when you’re ready, you’ll be born again with a greater understandin' of yourself and your place in the universe.”
I made some joke about it being even colder than death in New York, but it wasn’t funny and she didn’t laugh. She looked at me sympathetically.
“It’s all just an illusion, you know,” she said.
Which meant I was in the presence of someone who had seen through the illusion.
I didn’t tell her about the pervasive sense of dread and hopelessness I’d been feeling over the past few years, how it had overwhelmed me last fall. I didn’t tell her about the long walk to the bridge that night I first got to NY, or my call to Rob, about how when he answered, I couldn’t say anything, not even “hello,” and he just asked me if I was okay, and I said no, and he asked me if I wanted to talk about it, and I said no, and he asked me if I wanted him to talk, and I said yes, and so he just stayed on the phone for an hour or so and told me about how he was doing his laundry and now was wondering if he should go back to grad school.
“I’ve just seen too much to believe the world is as cold and as empty as you think it is, Llewyn,” she’d said, her eyes gleaming from the light off the river.
“I’d like to believe that, Cora.”
“Good. There are so many beautiful things I want to show you."
—
The phone rings at 3:24pm. An undisclosed number.
“Hello?” I try to sound casual.
“Yes, hi, is this… Llewyn?” The voice is friendly enough, and she has no trouble with my name. “I’m Maggie. Do you have some time to talk?”
Cora hasn’t told me much about what to expect, merely that one of the members of the Farm would reach out for something like an intake interview and that it’s very important I answer when they call. “Maggie.” Maggie’s Farm. Like the song. Interesting.
I’d assumed we’d chat, I’d be charming, I’d demonstrate some curiosity about ghost plant medicine and spirituality, maybe, but mostly just try not to sound like a narc.
“Of course! Happy to.”
“Wonderful. The community member who passed on your contact information had only lovely things to say about you and your spirit, so I’m pleased to get a chance to talk today. Now, I’m going to ask you to please do me a favor and turn off all electronics within 20 feet of where you are.”
“I’m sorry?”
“If you could please turn off or unplug any electronics in the room around you before we begin, that would be very helpful. We don’t want any disturbances."
Maybe Maggie is recording the call and doesn’t want any static or feedback on the line, but I can’t make much sense of it. I’m a good sport, though.
“Sure thing.”
I close my laptop and unplug the hot pot for good measure.
“Okay. I think that’s everything.”
There is a long pause on Maggie’s end of the line.
“Okay, good, Llewyn,” she says, and her voice sounds smooth and low.
“Now Llewyn, please turn off or dim any artificial lights and find a comfortable place to lie down on the floor.”
Maggie’s voice stirs in my mind the image of slow-moving, amber honey. I turn off the light in my room, and ease myself onto the cement ground. A dank, musty cold radiates into my back. In the windowless basement, I am in total darkness.
“Okay.”
“Good. You will hear seven tones, and then we will begin. I will ask you a series of questions, and it’s very important that you answer me as honestly as you are able to.”
“Of course. Thank you.”
I don’t quite know why I’m thanking her.
There is a long pause. I think I can hear the sound of a match striking. Then echoes the solemn, sonorous ringing of a bronze bowl. The noise sustains in a vibrating hum and slowly, almost imperceptibly, fades. I feel the tension in my neck ease.
There is silence.
Again, the bowl sounds through the darkness, hums, and dies.
And then again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
And again.
There is a long silence.
“Body of water, mind of light…” Maggie begins. I feel totally immersed in her mellifluous, honied voice. I am standing in a field and tall pines sway over me in brilliant sunshine.
“I will speak to You without a name, the You that existed before words defined your shape. Now tell me, when do You remember seeing the Darkness?"
A shudder runs through my relaxed body. I somehow know immediately what she means.
“I had a dream when I was a kid, maybe seven? It had glass eyes. It was in the woods. I would dream of it. All the time, coming for me out from the woods, watching the house, watching me sleep.”
“That was after you lost your father?”
I don’t remember having told Cora that.
“Yes.”
“Describe the Darkness.”
“It had oily black fur," I say, "and It wanted to stitch my hands together and It had a smell, like an awful burning wood, and burning oil.”
“What else?”
“There were always windows? Stained-glass windows in the woods. And when It would move toward me, It would change color from the light through the windows and It would freeze that way in the colored light, just staring at me.”
“Tell me about the windows.”
“They were of trees and plants and saints, I think, and lambs being slaughtered, and fire, and all of human history and what was to come.”
“And did the Darkness ever reach you?”
“It always found me but It never touched me; I was in a stone chapel, I think, and It was pounding on the wooden doors, but I had to collect gold coins falling from from the dead hands of dead parishioners, but It kept knocking, until…”
A voice inside me screams at me to stop.
“Until what?” Her voice is calm.
“I… I don’t remember.”
“Did someone answer the door?”
Yes.
“I don’t remember."
“Was it a woman?”
Yes.
“I… I don’t remember.”
“And did she invite It in or command It to depart?”
What the fuck is going on?
“I’m so sorry, I…”
There is a long silence on the line.
I hear the metallic bowl echoing once more. The hum vibrates for a long moment as I try to collect my thoughts.
“Thank you so much, Llewyn, that’s enough.”
Maggie’s voice is friendly again. She asks me a few more perfunctory questions about my past recreational drug use, my medical history, what I do for income, etc., but my mind is reeling from the intense memory. How did she know so much about me? Why was I so resistant to telling her the full dream?
We get off the phone with a few pleasantries and I find myself terribly unsettled. I text Cora:
just had my call! went well, i think
Which, is a straight lie. I’m worried I’ve embarrassed her somehow, or failed some kind of test that she’d vouched for me to take.
It’s somehow dark when I go outside. It’s much later than I’d thought.
—
The next time I see Cora is the following Wednesday. I’d worked over the weekend, and she’s been Upstate again in the meantime.
When we meet for lunch, I can tell she’s agitated. Her eyes keep flitting to the street outside, like she’s watching for someone.
“They had a lot of questions about you, Llew. They seem really interested in you, but were curious if you’re really open to the opportunity.”
“Of course. I think I am. It was kind of a… weird conversation, though.”
“Yeah?”
“Just very… transparent?” More like invasive. “Like she knew things about me? Or sensed them, I guess?”
Cora looks at me directly, studying me.
“They’re extremely perceptive people. That’s one of the things about doin' this kind of work; you start to see through a lot of the unnecess'ry boundaries between things.”
I look down and see she’s picking at a line of small, circular scabs on her wrist. They look like cigarette burns.
“Kambo,” she says.
She tells me that she’d had a very challenging time at the Farm this last trip. They’d administered frog secretions via their burn wounds on their ankles and wrists as a precursor to the ceremony and that it made for a more intense and insightful experience. Cora had been visited not by the Mother spirit of the Plant itself, but by something quite different. I find it difficult to follow her meandering recollections as she describes the experience.
“Are you okay?”
She smiles at me, but she looks very sad.
"It’s a teacher. It’s teachin' me to let go of the fear of what’s to come.”
—
I receive an invitation to come to the Farm for a large full moon ceremony the following month. I’d been wondering if there had been any fallout from my strange interview, but Cora assures me that, “it’s a very special ritual, that, and they’re quite eager to meet you.”
I tell her that I’m honored, that I appreciate that they want to include me. I don’t tell her about my growing discomfort with it though. I don’t tell her about how I keep hearing that ringing bowl sound when I read or at work or when I’m on the subway, or that for the first time in years, I’ve been having nightmares again about the woods behind my old childhood home. I don’t ask her if she’d told Maggie about how my dad died; I can't remember if I even ever told her.
Cora and I are starting to feel a bit misaligned. I’m finding it harder to follow her long discursive trains of thought, like I simply don’t have the right vocabulary or she’s making references to writers I haven’t read or friends she’s never mentioned before. I’m sure a lot of that is on me, though; I’ve been picking up more shifts at the bar during the week, and they're physically punishing shifts. I’m just exhausted and unfocused. But the Invitation remains.
What finally makes my decision for me is so utterly stupid and simple that I can’t even tell her the truth of it. I’m broke. I can’t afford to pay for the weekend Upstate when the “suggested donation” to the Farm is more than what I’m paying for a month’s rent. I’ve been paying for our meals with my cash tips and anxiously playing roulette each time I hand the waiter my card, praying that it doesn't come back declined.
I simply tell Cora that I’m not ready.
“Aw, Llewyn… that sucks. I was really hopin' to share this one with you…”
I have an immediate flood of regret for disappointing her, at not just saying an emphatic yes to anything she wants from me, at missing an opportunity to grow more aligned with her and understand this enormous part of her eccentric world.
But there’s also a sense of relief.
“Maybe I can join for one later this spring, or summer…” I offer, but the implied assumption that we’ll even still be dating by then hangs over my words uncomfortably.
“Yeah, let’s just see what happens,” she says. Her eyes are sympathetic.
And that’s how we leave it.
—
I send Cora an encouraging text after she leaves for the weekend:
offering good luck and a strong warrior spirit on your journey, young grasshopper
She doesn’t have service up on the Farm, I know that, but she’ll see it on the train back to the city in a few days and know I was thinking of her.
I work doubles at the bar that weekend. Raphael lets me pay rent a few days late. My texts to Cora sit in green bubbles on my screen, undelivered.
The following week stretches out rainy and cold. Spring is refusing to emerge and by Thursday the sky is leaden with another snowstorm. I figure she’s staying up on the Farm a bit longer when a few more texts go undelivered and my two calls "cannot be completed as dialed." It’s probably safer anyway, what with the weather.
Part of me suspects I’m being ghosted, but I text her again the following weekend:
snowed in down here, thinking of you, hope you’re doing okay… let me know when you’re back?
Green bubble. Undelivered.
Nothing.
I have a few of her books and a golden birdcage I’d bought for her birthday present, and I use those as an excuse to go by her apartment in Crown Heights after the city digs itself out of the blizzard. A neighbor buzzes me in. As I climb the four flights, I realize I’m actually nervous to knock on her door; what do I think I’m going to say if she’s home and avoiding me? What if there’s someone else at her place?
When I get to the top landing, I see that her blue rain boots are still gone from where they live in the hall, and a few delivery boxes sit in their place. Some letters are tucked under the metal kick plate of the door. It doesn’t look like she’s been back. Hope springs eternal she’ll reach out when she comes back to the city.
She doesn’t though.
I give up messaging. She's made her point. I occasionally look her up on social media, but she’d always kept a very low profile there. No posts since before we started seeing each other. Nevertheless, I find myself looking at her sparkling dark eyes and long, wind-tousled black hair in photos she posted years earlier. She’s very, very beautiful, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to remember that laugh.
“You have to experience the illusion of death first before you can be reborn,” she’d said on that wonderful, cold night on the river. Her words keep coming back to me.
Our relationship, this funny, serendipitous, sparkling, and meaningful relationship, was dead.
Maybe out of that death, something else will be reborn.
Maybe we’ll run into each other on another street corner some day. Maybe then I’ll be ready. Maybe then I’ll tell her everything.