Sage Burning on Avon

“Listen to Elijah!” Maddie shrieked down the hall. I grabbed my vape and sat up in bed, my heart beating like a fish flung overboard. A half-moon over the mountains pierced my open window. I pulled on my sweatpants and paced the small square of my room, pushing a boner down and sucking my Juul. I remembered the dream I’d just had and clutched my stomach. I exhaled a nicotine ghost and went soft in contemplation.

I met Eli last summer when I ran out of record label cash, moved back in with my parents and joined the gardening company his dad Daniel runs. After a short sublet at a house meant for Fellows at Christ Episcopal Church, of which I was not one, I took a room in Eli’s house here on Avon Street. It’s like a halfway house for educated young townies. The gardening company can be described in similar terms. We’re all artists of a kind, diploma stashed in an attic, who now tend the fields of the superrich. Daniel calls it a reeducation camp. I basically agree.

The red bulb in our hallway glowed under my door. I sat cross-legged on the floor and blew vapor into the light. My eyes felt swollen and droopy. I was still stoned from the weed I’d smoked curating a mixtape for Hannah. I planned on giving it to her once she got back from her trip home to London. She’d only been gone for a week, but I needed to act. As she danced her Russian-Jewish ass through the automatic doors of Dulles Airport, Hannah had shrugged her auburn hair and said, “Sometimes I forget that I love you.”

I met Hannah in January after a nasty breakup with Jackie, who I’d been dating since last summer. Jackie was a history major writing her senior thesis on the C.I.A.’s involvement in South American coups, which I thought was cool, and she wore black turtlenecks well in her straight blonde hair. We parted ways when she found a box of Belgian condoms I’d brought back from tour. The following two weeks, I recorded demos and drank gin after my short days of pruning winter spruces. I struggled to understand what I’d done to Jackie. It felt like a sad breakdown in communication, but I wasn’t sure.

Then I found Hannah on Tinder. She responded to my intro, “Do you ever black out and read the Bible?” and we spent every night together until May graduation—the usual endpoint for my relationships in this college town. Hannah moved to DC for social media marketing and I stayed here with my band. By October, we’d been giving the long-distance thing a chance, but it was pulling my brain apart. Half of it was in Charlottesville while the other was in DC. It was becoming hard to bear. So, in this crucial playlist, I included “Live With Me” by The Rolling Stones, “Marry Me” by Al Greene and “Don’t Dream It’s Over” by Crowded House.

To honor the occasion, I rolled a joint with one of the love letters Hannah had sent from her summer house in East Hampton. Since they were thinner than Zig Zags, I kept them in a cedar box with my weed. But a strange thing happened. When I inhaled the blend of ink and weed, I felt a cold ripple of energy zip into my chest and two eyes appear behind me on the wall. I hunched up and put the Juul to my lips, but I didn’t look. I was too high to take the risk. Then the world fell back to an immense distance, like I was a giant and the desk was a thousand feet below.

“Aww, cut the bullshit!” Maddie said in her Appalachian chime. “Get in here, dude.” I pulled up my pants and walked into the hall, vapor sticking to the red light. Eli’s door creaked open and I poked my head into a wave of smoke.

Maddie, dressed in a WTJU Radio t-shirt and soured in deep makeup despite the time of night, pranced across the room with a burning sage wrap. The smoke curled around piles of second-hand books, stacks of records leaning in the closet, a yoga mat in the corner, a large wooden desk littered with horticultural graphs of native meadow grasses, and on the wall a photo of Walt Whitman torn from a 1970’s National Geographic. Eli—a small, bearded and altogether fawn-like man—sat still on his mattress on the floor. Judging by the way his pupils enlarged, he seemed to recognize me.

Eli’s mother comes from a wealthy Jewish Long Island family and his father a poor Irish- Catholic family from the English shire of Somerset. That’s near the Arthurian site of Avalon, where small psilocybic mushrooms used to spread like wildfire in the hills. Daniel, Eli’s dad and my boss, devoured them by the basket with the other village teens as they romped through the mist. Daniel was raised by nuns before dropping out and traveling Europe, the Middle East and most of Asia. He met Eli’s mother at a hashished hostel in Israel during the early 80’s. They fell in love, got lost in India and were married within six months. Their son grew up on Virginia’s Charlottesville-Albemarle line and attended a school for troubled teens. Eli was the kind of stoner skateboarder who hung out at the old water tower, on the edge of downtown near the river, with classic bums and demented hippies and his own crew of young punks. He studied National Security at Virginia Commonwealth University, living on hamburger meat in a cracked- out motel.

“Did you see it too?” Eli said.

 I choked on some vapor and touched my sternum. “What do you mean?”

 Maddie put her face in between my crack in the door. “Eli saw a woman standing over him.”

 “What did you see? I know we’ve been kind of in a drug-heavy season.”

“No.” Eli shook his head. “You would have seen her too.” He spoke through his yellow teeth, shattered last summer in a skateboarding accident. Eli attempted a coast down Preston Avenue, from UVA to downtown, on two tabs of acid. He made it to where tracks hang over the steepening street, right before the intersection at the bottom. When his board started to wobble from the high speed, Eli felt so karmically rejuvenated that he sunk deeper into the groove. He lost control within seconds and flew through the humid twilight. Now his teeth whistled: “I can see that you’re afraid. But you don’t need to be.”

“That one grave in the backyard is totally hers,” Maddie said, waving the sage. “The old owners left it for a reason. She’s just got some business to do before heading out for good.”

My back started to hurt, all bent over on one knee, so I stood up and stretched. “Like what would she need to do, for example?”

“I don’t think it’s like that,” Eli said. He looked just below a Hüsker Dü poster nailed to the closet wall. “She was here, like to be here, in the way that we’re here right now. Like, what are you doing here?” His neck turned and he looked me in the eyes. He jumped back in space.

“Well,” I said, left eye twitching.

 Eli returned his gaze to the closet, nodding to himself. Maddie put her hands on my back and whispered into my ear: “She was here to warn us.”

I turned on all the lamps in my room. One is on my desk by the window overlooking the backyard, one on the floor next to my bed, and one, round as a fertility goddess, sits on a bookshelf next to my closet. I keep my record player in there and clothes on the overhead beams. From a dirty stack, I grabbed a blue shirt with the Grateful Dead bears advertising an event for UVA’s Tri Delta chapter. When we met, Hannah was a leading sister of this sorority. She was also their cocaine dealer. She gave me the shirt when I was in a rush out to the farm one wet morning and needed something I could get dirty. It’s true, for a while this shirt was used for manual labor. I enjoyed sweating into my rich girl’s cotton. But now that she’s out of town, I use it for jacking off.

I lowered myself flat as can be on the bed. The window blinds were missing when I moved in, so I play this game every time. But that night I felt especially exposed. My room was the only one lit up in the neighborhood so early in the morning. Translucent fog traced the dark mountains. I snuggled into the depths of where my mattress meets the corner of the room and cold paint riddled my back with goosebumps. I pulled down my sweatpants, phone out, and opened up Twitter without thinking.

I dug further into my corner. A new account called UVA DENOUNCED was overrunning the timeline and quickly gaining followers. I grabbed my crotch and winced. One post, getting close to a thousand retweets, featured the picture of a fourth-year biology major with dark hair, his name and address, and the caption: “Known cheater with multiple accounts of sexual coercion and emotional manipulation, including one-time sex with a virgin. STAY AWAY. Email the Dean of Students HERE to promptly remove this predator from our student body and assure that UVA remains a safe space for ALL, not just the #PrivilegedAndPerverted.”

I jumped past my window and hid the rag under a pile of socks. I crawled to the window over my backyard. The tombstone smirked in a patch of sunlight. I sucked the Juul like an oxygen mask and laid in bed, wide-eyed and exhausted. “What the fuck,” I said to the ceiling. “What the actual fuck, man.”

Two hours later, Eli and I cut blackberry vines out of a pine grove. Thorns rained down on our heads, sticking in my shirt at the neck, as he told me about his weekend plan. That night he was going to eat mushrooms in the woods of Northern Virginia with his friend Paul, a self-identified shaman and long-term junkie. It had been in the works for a while. “The thing is,” Eli said slowly, “Paul did a tarot reading this morning, in preparation for our trip, and it seems that this will be a difficult journey.” He drew a box in the dirt with his finger as if it held a shadow. “The lady showed up in the cards.”

I struggled to pierce the thick flesh of a vine with my shovel and it sprayed rocks from the ground. I took out my Juul. “Are you still gonna do it?”

It was already warmer than when we’d arrived. Clouds were moving into the woods surrounding the estate. Rain made its way through the green thicket and tapped lightly on my baseball cap. I smelled Eli’s breath.

“If you don’t hear from me by Sunday evening, call the Alexandria Police Department.”

“No doubt.” I pulled hard on my Juul. My flannel shirt was stuck on a thorn. “I’ll be praying for you.”

Eli grimaced against my sarcasm. He pointed his clippers at me and then towards the shadow in the dirt: “Burn some sage for yourself in the meantime.”

I exhaled Juul smoke: “Ain’t I burning enough of that bush as it is, man?”

He didn’t laugh. “That’s the wrong stuff.”

I considered the new information, mulching tree berms alone down the winding driveway. I didn’t know if we needed a priest, an in-house therapist or both. When I left work, driving to town through gold and red hills, my thoughts drifted back to Jackie. I’d joked with the farm crew about getting laid on my European tour. I was like Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise, French cigarettes and all. Passing a tractor in the left lane, I put in my Creedence CD and sang along to “Who’ll Stop the Rain.”

I was on University Circle in front of Heffner House when I cut off the engine. Maybe it’s because I was short on money and instinct kicked in. Heffner House is my childhood home, which also serves as the center for my mom’s Christian non-profit and a space for my dad’s academic events. My parents named the center after the Protestant theologian Hubert Heffner, who died in a camp outside Berlin for trying to kill Hitler. My dad has made a career out of studying this man. It culminated in a recent biography that rattled the evangelical world by suggesting Heffner was gay.

I walked on cobblestone past shrubs that still held pink flowers. A college girl with brown hair and a tight black sweater walked a few paces ahead. Once her hand was on the doorknob, she turned around to check me out. “Are you here for the study? If so…welcome! You’ll love Cathy.”

I waited at the door and pretended to smile. She smiled back and waited for me to speak, holding a copy of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and a pink highlighter against her thin chest. After too long, she opened the door and I shuffled into the entrance hall.

“Excuse me,” I said too loud. 

“That’s my boy!” I heard from the library around the corner. The girl went red and she was cute. My mom called again. “Come in here boy! You don’t want to miss this.”

I held my ground by the hall-tree. “Do you have any sage?”

“Look what we dug up. Come on. It’s almost over.”

The girl sent me an apologetic glance and stood to the side. Popcorn smells wafted out of the library. “What the fuck,” I muttered, taking off my boots.

I poked my heard around the door and my mom let out a shriek. “It’s the star of the show!”

My parents sat on the gray mid-century chic sofa with their assistant Camille, a white woman in her thirties with curly brown hair and Flannery O’Connor glasses. “Wait,” my mom called. “Is that Lena out there?”

Lena cooed something about St. Thomas Aquinas and my mom gasped. “You must have missed the group text. The catering fell through, so we had to push Faith à la Carte back an hour. We’re pivoting to Peruvian chicken. But come on over, you’re just in time!”

Lena slinked in and stood next to me by the doorway, smelling like vanilla. She looked up to a sheet stretching over a wall of bookshelves, candles twinkling on the mantle overhead. The bag under my left eye jumped three times. Projected on the white canvas was a home video shot in Baltimore circa 1994.

“Daddy found the VHS tape last week and had Camille here, the tech genius, digitize them. Watch!”

My brother, two and a half years older, was dressed like an Indian and waving a spear. A toddler in flannel crawled across the oriental rug and reached for my mom, who was up on the couch. “He wants his momma!” my dad cheered from behind the camera. But my mom didn’t pick me up or say hi or anything, just looked around the room. She wasn’t paying attention just: nothing happened at all. I turned around on the ground, not whimpering, and wandered the room. I suddenly felt Lena’s hand on my shoulder, her face blushed in the candlelight, and I bolted out of the room.

My dad caught me by the front door: “Hey buddy.” He laid on the carpet and lifted his right leg. “You know the deal. A five-minute stretch for hard cash, up front.” I placed my hands on the back upper section of his leg and applied pressure. He groaned and threw me a twenty- dollar bill from the floor.

“When is Columbia Records gonna sign you guys? I sent your new EP—which is fabulous by the way—to this young sexy writer at Rolling Stone. She couldn’t believe that youweren’t already packing out stadiums. Could you send me a press pack? She’s in the politics department, we met over a piece she’s doing on the Heffner book, but she may pitch a story toone of the rock editors.”

I thought about it, pushing his leg further until he said, “Stop.”

“Yeah. I could get something together for you soon.”

He frowned and waved his hands. “Soon? How about ASAP? Soon isn’t how it works, buddy. You’ve got to be NOW. You’ve gotta ride people. Follow up emails. You’ve got to be more Jewish about these things.”

I dropped his leg. “Are you being serious?”

He stood up. I noticed a new painting on the wall behind him. It was a larger-than-life caricature of President Trump. His mouth was wide open, and an industrial tube ran out of it spitting sludge into the brain of a truck driver. “RACISM” was written in bold across the tube. “Well,” my dad said. “How are negotiations with your current label? Are they helping you step up, get you to a major for the next release?”

“Wouldn’t that be against their own interest?”

“Rising tide lifts all boats.”

I grabbed the cash and started putting on my shoes. “Isn’t that an Adolf Eichmann quote?” He yelled for his money back as I closed the door behind me.

By the time I got back to my room with some sage brush, which I bought at a rug store downtown with a penchant for the occult, the mountains outside my window were cast under a deep shadow. A swath of buildings, cut into the small valley that contains my side of town, began to blink in the onset of twilight. It was getting cold, so I shut my windows for the ceremony. I felt like a rookie. I grew up Episcopalian, unacquainted with smoke and perfume. I grasped the burning bush with awkward hands, circling my small room, wafting extra smoke on my jacking-off shirt and pausing over the box of letters and weed. The trapped fumes made me queasy and the sky plunged into black.

Eli wandered in wearing a camo jacket with a red cooler strapped against his back. “Far out,” he said, gesturing to the smoke with a chunk of sourdough.

“You think it’s working?” I said.

He spoke with his mouth full: “Is anything coming up you for right now?”

“I guess, I’m thinking about Jackie again. You remember her. A history major.”

“Oh yeah.” Eli sat down on the bed. “Y’all seemed to connect.”

“Yeah. Well, she once told me that burning sage is cultural appropriation. Like it’s fucked up for white people to do it.”

Eli narrowed his eyes. “That bums me out. Like, the Native peoples of this country were on to something. We’d be wise to just dig it.”

I passed him the sage brush. “Speaking of all that—you know there’s this new Twitter account at UVA basically Me-tooing people?

“That’s heavy.” Eli stood up and paced the room. “A lot of scary shit goes down at those parties.”

“True. But it’s like, these days you could have just cheated and end up on the list. They’re out of material but the machine’s still running.” I hit the Juul and squinted in the smoke.

“When you carry pain around with you,” Eli said, “it’s gotta go somewhere.”

“But why online?”

“I’m not sure if that’s a meaningful question.” Eli put the sage in the ashtray on my desk, tiptoed to the door and gave me a namaste. “I’ll let you know when I’m at the campsite with Paul. We need to be in touch for this.”

“Peace,” I said.

My phone vibrated against the desk. Hannah’s face lit up the screen with glossy pink and the space between my chest plates began to ache. “Want to move to London?” She sounded coked out. I smiled and Juuled in the reflection of my black window.

“Sure, I’ll just get my work visa. Would a PHD count? I’ve been sitting on that get-rich scheme for too long.”

She laughed. “Won’t you just marry me? You’d become a dual citizen. Just like me, al- ways and for-ever.”

I felt a glimmer in my pants. “Oh yeah?” I laid back on my bed. “I lit some sage an hour ago. Maybe it’ll be good luck.”

“So,” she laughed, “stealing Indigenous ceremonies is part of your plan?”

“Look. I just need one strong and guilt-free spiritual cleanse. To be honest, I should buy a dreamcatcher as well.”

“That reminds me,” Hannah said. “I had a dream this afternoon. I was at the Richmond airport and they had a huge lingerie store. It was cheap, but fine quality. I bought the proper bra and stockings for my garter and everything and wore them under my clothes to surprise you at your house. I got there and we had incredible sex. But when I woke up you weren’t there, and I was so mad.”

I lowered my voice. “Well, aren’t we married already?”

She scoffed. “I’m not the doe-eyed girl I was this summer, pouring my fantasy into a footnote. That was just forgery. Here, I feel like a woman. You wouldn’t believe this, but this week’s been my first time home since Christmas of third year. And this morning was the first time in forever that I’ve stayed up all night without crying at the sunrise.”

My eye twitched as I turned over in bed. “Oh yeah?” Pain moved into my left rib and it hurt to breathe.

Hannah exhaled loudly. “None of that tone, boy. We agreed that you weren’t doing blow anymore. You’re the one who gets all spazzy.” The last bit of juice in my Juul pod backfired, burning my tongue with synthetic nicotine. I relit the sage at my desk, jogged down the red-lit stairs and spat on Avon Street.

“Is that so?” I yelled against the Friday evening traffic. Out-of-towners hauled ass through Belmont to I-64, casting random white beams over the paved sidewalk and colonial porches. “You said—just last weekend in DC, when you literally bled on your polka dot dress— you said you never wanted a chemical to keep us apart.” I hooked past the neon signs of the corner store and raised my voice at a brick wall. “And I’ve been doing the work. I haven’t performed stoned since Nashville in September. Everybody’s high in Nashville anyway.”

Hannah’s voice became frightening and calm. “Do you ever consider the possibility that you might have Tourette’s Syndrome? You just say the most ridiculous things sometimes like you have zero filter. That’s a clinical sign. It honestly concerns me. And speaking of work—the sad thing is that I’m calling you tonight because things are finally clicking for me. I was indeed up past sunrise, yes having a little to keep us going. Only because I reconnected with my high school friend Charlotte who’s got the funding, almost secured, for a boutique London fashion blog. Charlotte says my experience in digital marketing, and personal understanding of the target consumer base, makes me a strong contender for social media manager. Isn’t that amazing?”

The red lights of passing cars grew fuzzy, like my brain was in Jello. Looking up at the moon, I sat in the store’s one parking spot and sucked an empty Juul. I texted Eli: “Yo, dude. How goes the journey?”

“Hello!” Hannah said. I put the phone back to my ear. “What about a congratulations? Nothing. You know, I can’t let your anxiety cloud my judgment right now. I’ve got a week to decide if I’m all in on this project or not. I’d probably need to move here for the nuts-and-bolts side of things. This might come as a shock to you, but I’m not just on Twitter all day. And I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to talk until I’ve made up my mind. You just make me feel so guilty all the time.”

“OK.” Speaking made my throat hurt and tears made my vision blurrier than before.

“I’m sorry,” Hannah said, voice growing tender as she hung up.

I wasn’t sure just what I was crying about. It was as if the stars coming out in between patches of cloud was enough. After a few minutes, hiding my face from passersby, I went in to the store and bought two packs of Virginia Tobacco-flavored Juul pods.

When I got home, Maddie was on the couch reading about Borderline Personality Disorder. A counselor at James Madison University diagnosed her two years ago and recommended self-knowledge. Apparently, it’s helpful with relationships. She looked up from her book. “What are you doing here?” she said.

“Well, I live here.”

 Her cheeks went pale. “Eli said he was taking you with him.”

I faked concentration on opening a pack of Juul pods. “To the woods?”

 “He just said those words and I figured you were tripping with him and Paul tonight.”

 The alarm in Maddie’s expression took me by surprise. I headed to the kitchen and opened the fridge. “He was being poetical. Our dear Elijah is experienced with psychedelics. He’ll land on his feet.”

Maddie sat on the counter. “Just double check, will ya? For me. He hasn’t been answering my calls.”

I opened the cabinet over her head. “According to my special radar, he’s tripping balls right now.”

I walked up the stairs with two PBR tall boys, a glass of ice and a half-empty bottle of Bulleit. Maddie perched on the couch’s fat arm and called up: “You burned that sage wrong, by the way. You have to open all your windows. The smoke riles up evil in your room, but if there’s no exit things get way worse.”

I dropped my glass. But the bottle of bourbon was intact, luckily, and the cans suffered minor dents. “Do you me a favor, Maddie.” I tiptoed over the mess of glass and ice. “I like you being here and all—but stay the fuck out of my room, ok?”

“Fine.” She turned her head as I walked past for a new glass of ice. “Just maybe, in the future, don’t burn shit and leave. It’s called a fire alarm. You’d think we’d have dismantled them all by now, but there’s still one left. And you’ll need a broom. There’s one in my car.”

I walked to the steps. “Maybe later,” I said, then yelped: my foot was full of shards.

 I sat on the toilet’s plastic white lid and pulled bloody teeth from my skin. They came out in winces. I held my foot over the shower floor and poured hydrogen peroxide. For a split second, I recognized a face in the bubbling cuts. I blinked twice and a speckle of dots cascaded across the grimy tiles. Shaking my head, I cracked open a tallboy and checked my phone. Eli had texted me back: “Dosing now. Should kick in soon. What’s up on your end?”

“Just chillin’ out,” I said. “How’s the come-up?”

The iMessage typing symbol appeared then went away. I wrapped my foot in gauze, hobbled to my desk and poured a bourbon. The ice was perfectly frozen, and the alcohol sent warmth and calm into my chest. But I was still troubled. What did Eli mean—he took me with him? Eli’s a strange guy. Over the summer, he lectured me for eating lunch before I watered in a row of inkberry bushes. I could have bashed his skull with a shovel right then. The heat index was over a hundred, and he was saying plants are just like us—they feel pain and sadness when they’re ignored. Don’t gardeners need water too? What about humans for Christ’s sake? But I was too exhausted to move.

I finished the first tallboy and poured a second bourbon. What else is a hippie good for? I thought. Him and Maddie deserve each other. But—I contended, chomping on a piece of ice— their sensitivity to the connection of energy is not wrong. I stood up, feeling the whiskey in my legs as I hopped to both windows and opened them.

The autumn breeze flowered into my room, mixing my head up with everything Hannah had said. I looked out at the ghostly moon, arcing over the town we’d shared for six burning months, and my eyes stung with anger. I snotted and laughed: “What the fuck?” To stay with her, I would have to get into a university in London. That meant taking the GRE immediately, scoring letters from professors I hadn’t spoken to since graduation and researching programs. I felt like I was doing taxes with a gun to my temple. Maybe I did have Tourette’s—it’s just fucked up that she would use that against me. I’d supported her laundry list of neuroses this whole time. When it came to me, there was no time to get better. I thought of her tits and snotted again, sticking my hands through the windows to make sure they were open, then lit another wrap of sage at my desk.

Purple-gray smoke filled the room. I took the box out of my desk that contained Hannah’s letters and a quarter ounce of weed. I found one that really hurt: “I see so many things in you, a klaediscope (sp?) of different things that fit together to make the person I love. I see so much it’s overwhelming at times. I’m just grateful you rolled up to my porch in a red jacket and cracked me open and make me cry not from loneliness or fear or emptiness but from happiness and missing something and being someone.”

One of the most intoxicating feelings is being seen rather than watched. When I was on stage, Hannah saw me from a different vantage point than the general audience. Her aura possessed a softness, near the front wave of concertgoers, green-gray eyes not just watching but receiving me. Now, as I rolled her words into a joint, I felt more like a mirror—and that brought me a devilish thought. I scrambled through my drawer, past lube and empty Juul pods and crumpled tax forms, and found a tiny bag of blow. It was left over from my last really bad night, which ended with us snorting lines with Monopoly money and watching Donnie Darko at six in the morning. As we shivered in bed, the gray morning breaking into my skull, I was convinced I’d never sleep again. I dumped out the bag on my closed laptop and cut two lines. When Keith Richards’s dad died, he smoked the ashes with cocaine. My separation from Hannah felt like a similar occasion. I did a little cross on my forehead and chest, unsure how the Catholics do it, and sprinkled the blow into my joint.

I lifted the needle over Let It Bleed and the grooves spun in little tides. I placed it on the title track and sat cross-legged in front of the two speakers. After a moment of crackling static, the drums busted in with twangy guitars. I jumped up, hardly feeling my bandaged foot, and danced around like a chicken. When the chorus came on—“we all need someone we can bleed on!”—I snagged the bourbon and pulled straight from the bottle. The solo hit and I lit my joint.

My heart was bursting like a rabbit’s caught in the light. It felt as if my brain was embalmed in gasoline, reading colors in reverse and sounds like memories. Nausea crept up from my stomach. As the final refrain rolled ahead—“let it out rider”—my phone lit up on the floor with Eli’s name and a blurry emoji. I slowed down my chicken dance and lifted up the screen to my face: a cartoon witch with red eyes and black teeth pointed at my soul. The back of my head hit the ground. I screamed in silence as my mom rose above me from the floorboards. She looked about thirty, brown hair folding over a sallow face, and she began spinning in mid-air and scraping out her eyes. I felt a gust of wind enter my lungs. “Heal me!” I yelled. “Heal me!”

As if someone had spoken into my heart, I crawled to my desk, placed my weed into the box of letters, and hid it behind a row of books. I curled up on the floor and fell asleep, every lamp still on, to the sound of rain as it grew into a driving rhythm.

Fear followed the edges of my dreams. I felt the ten o’clock sun and assumed I’d done something bad. While back at my spot on the hardwood floor, I was now clutching a bottle of lighter fluid and a box of matches. The matches were branded by C&O, a bar down my street past the railroad tracks, but I couldn’t find a receipt for the lighter fluid. All I really knew was that my skull ached, and my foot felt like it’d been hit by a dirty bomb. I got into bed, battling a wave of nausea with heroic effort, and checked the Fire Department’s Twitter page. It was as if Charlottesville had hit a statistical glitch: there hadn’t been a single incident downtown or in the Main Street and Belmont areas—not even a cat stuck up a tree. I took three advils and scrolled on with my Juul.

I saw a retweet from Jackie’s old housemate Tara. It was a UVA DENOUNCED post detailing the “emotionally manipulative” tactics of a fifth-year art student I’d seen at a few parties, usually smoking cigs on the porch with their girlfriend. I knew Tara always liked me. I’d seen her almost every night the previous summer. She laughed at the faces I made when I got high on their roof, like I couldn’t see. But, as Jackie explained, it would be a bad idea to tell her how we broke up. Tara was “very principled.” I sat up in bed and looked again. She had quoted the tweet and added, “More reports incoming…” along with a clenched fist emoji. I threw the phone into a blanket. “Oh shit.” I pulled on sweatpants and hit the Juul hard, holding back vomit: “Help me, Jesus!”

Downstairs in the kitchen, the coffee pot trembled in my hands. My first instinct was to text Jackie and apologize all over again. But that would only supply fresh evidence: screen shots are like gold in the cancellation economy. The trick is to never give an inch. I’d seen this happen to a critically acclaimed singer I knew, a colleague from New Jersey. He tried to preempt incoming claims of “sexual coercion” (convincing a woman to leave her boyfriend for him) with a formal statement of guilt. Management, label, distribution, hometown venues and radio stations, band members—all associated parties severed their legal and social contracts within twenty-four hours. I lit the stove with my C&O matches. “Fuck that,” I said, throwing bacon on the skillet. I knocked back some water in my empty cup and poured another black coffee.

The truth is that Jackie said I could sleep with whoever I wanted to on my tours. I’d just gotten back from a Midwestern run. That night, a cool summer evening, we drank beer on a balcony looking over the green, lamplit campus. I spoke behind a cig about how hard it is to tour and keep up an emotional relationship. Jackie seemed to sense where I was going and led me inside to her room. It was lit by Christmas lights and had posters of Paris, Texas and Soviet propaganda on the wall. She sat me down on her mattress and said, to my accepting surprise, there was no need to choose between sex on the road with strangers and a nice time between us in town. We took off our clothes and changed the subject. Afterwards, I walked up the hill to my parents’ basement, played Your Funeral, My Trial by Nick Cave on the turntable and we never mentioned it again. Three months later a box of Belgian condoms fell out of my backpack on to her bedroom floor, and our arrangement was suddenly painful. But that nuance didn’t matter now. I cracked two eggs over the skillet, a pellet of grease hitting my hand. And as I washed my burning flesh under the sink, the publicist in my head prepared a statement: “Unfortunately, Jackie misunderstood the terms of our commitment.”

I ate my breakfast on the couch, refreshing the DENOUNCED page. Expecting star athletes and tenured professors, I saw a stream of undergraduate activists, TA’s and workers at off-campus bars—but nothing about me or my band. The phone shook in my hands and my guts started to rebel. I slid the hood of my gray sweatshirt over my head and slouched into the sofa. Eli came in the doorway and I almost passed out. His jeans were muddy, camouflage jacket torn at the shoulder and hiking boots unlaced. Yellow leaves tangled up his short hair. I plugged in a new Juul pod. “How’d it go, man?”

Eli set two moon-plate eyes on me. “I might still be tripping. But it’s important for you to know, especially today. God is real. The Devil is also very real, even though they’re good at making us think that they don’t exist. That’s part of what makes the Devil so powerful. But you have to let the Light in.”

He kept his eyes on mine and I saw he wasn’t kidding. I followed him outside to the porch. We listened in silence to leaves stirring up the yard and the cars on Avon Street as they made ocean sounds with their tires. After a few minutes, Eli hobbled into our house and returned with a pot of mushroom tea. He poured me a cup, which I kept down despite the bitter taste, and told me what he knew.

When Eli saw the white lady in his closet, he became convinced we were on “parallel astral planes.” She arrived to send us on a spiritual journey and appoint Eli as our guide. The goal, she spoke with telepathy, was to rid our house of a demon. When he took mushrooms with Paul and started coming up unusually fast, Eli realized the demon was making an aggressive,dual-front attack. He tried to warn me with the witch emoji while he still could. After periods of pissing and growling on all fours around the forest, alternating with blackout states of pure spiritual pain, Eli watched a white balloon float out of his chest and zip into the ether. His soul now gone, he became a vessel for visons of Maddie—her parents’ trauma, and their parents’ trauma, a long lineage of Appalachian alcoholics and schizos, pedophiles and depressives.

He came to consciousness at dawn with Paul’s palm on his face.

 The sky started to get dark. “Let’s sage,” Eli said.

 He lit our last wrap and chanted over me as I bathed. The bathroom was a tabernacle of smoke and vapor. The grimy wall tiles pulsed in the steam. I sat down in the tub, breathing in and out, and felt the water against my back. I thought of Hannah and felt the loss of her body. I cried as if I would never stop. Hearing me whimper under his chant, Elijah reached past the curtain and touched my chest, pressing into the bone, and I went limp. He wrapped me in a towel and lead me to bed.

In my dark room I heard a whishing, then I saw my bedsheets move. I watched my hands—the color and texture of charcoal—rise up from my body and press together in prayer.

Will Marsh grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia, and formed the indie rock group Gold Connections in 2013. Between tours and recordings, with releases on Fat Possum and EggHunt Records, Marsh began quietly writing fiction. He now lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he attends the Creative Writing Workshop at UNO and continues to perform as Gold Connections.

Twitter: @GoldConnectionz

Instagram: Gold_Connections