Faery Tale (2 page)

I focus again on the pages in front of me. I tell myself,
All I want is to heal some heartbreak
. Upstairs in the glass-walled building, I flick on the desk lamp in my third-floor interior office. Without windows, the fluorescent lights give me a raucous headache, and I'm not usually a headache kind of girl. Glancing at my calendar, my eyes find the familiar photo pinned near the top of my bulletin board.

Have you ever looked at a photo so much that you can't even truly see it anymore? I examine it again, trying to break it down into pieces. I see a man who looks far older than his sixty years, walking down a winding set of stone stairs. At his feet, a small brown-and-white dog is captured mid-movement, and he has turned to face the camera above him, his eyes gazing back at mine. The expression he wears is one of faux surprise: he hardly ever plays it straight for the camera. I know this, because neither do I. In a moment he'll call out,
Hey, you coming?

I see a flash of fabric breeze past my office door.

“Good morning, Signe,” my boss says.

“Good morning to you,” I say brightly. I flick on my computer and glance at the persistent blinking light on my phone.

You have five new messages
.

I reach for the phone with one hand and my coffee with the other. Lately, I think, my face hurts from smiling.

“Hi, this is Signe Pike, returning a call . . .”

 

I am going to heal your heartbreak, because I have no idea how to heal my own.

—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “THE STOLEN CHILD”

 

 

 

 

W
HEN I was a little girl I believed in faeries as a matter of course. To say that I was obsessed with faeries wouldn't be the truth—I simply believed in them is all. When my father took me and my sister walking, I imagined there were faeries everywhere: flitting through the bushes, underneath the toadstools, balancing on the petals of the wildflowers that forced their way through the snowy winter crust in spring.

When you're little, it's perfectly acceptable to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy. Do you remember the incredible beauty of those days? Lying awake listening for the faint jingle of a sleigh bell, or peeking through your eyelashes, determined to spot a magical creature with every creak on the stairs? But inevitably, reality comes crashing in.

We forget how devastating it was to learn that the magical creatures from stories aren't real. We come to understand that growing up means getting older. And getting older means facing up to a certain amount of loss. When I suffered
my
loss, I woke up one morning with the undeniable feeling that it was high time we sat down to discuss: We live in a world where 9/11 happened. We're involved in wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. There's genocide in Darfur. There are murders, and suicide bombings, and newspaper descriptions of human scalps hanging off restaurant light fixtures. There's the melting of the polar ice caps, hunger, starvation, and the killing of precious endangered species. I wanted to say to everyone, I don't know about you, but this was
not
the happily ever after I was hoping for.

Worse, somewhere along the line I had lost my faith in humanity.

I began to wonder where all our innocence goes and why we let it slip away, when the thing to do at a time like now is to
fight
it. How might it change the world if we could reclaim some of our magic? How would we look at one another, treat one another, if each of us recognized that inside every man or woman is a little boy or girl who loves popcorn, is still afraid of monsters under the bed, or believes that fairy tales really
do
come true? Maybe we would treat each other with more kindness, more carefully, more respectfully.

I wanted to find something of the beauty of myth that we've left behind, carry its shreds before us all, so we could acknowledge it, somehow bring it back to life. I wanted to delve back into that world that cradled us when we were young enough to still touch it, when trolls lived under creek bridges, faeries fluttered under mushroom caps, and the Tooth Fairy only came once you were truly sleeping. I wanted to see if enchantment was somehow still there, simply waiting to be reached. When I felt my loss, I realized that if I could do anything in this life, I wanted to travel the world, searching for those who were still awake in that old dreamtime, and listen to their stories—because I had to know that there were grown-ups out there who still believed that life could be magical.

And in that moment, I decided,
I am going to find the goddamn faeries.

Do you think that sounds silly?

A better question might be, do you think I'm kidding? I am deadly serious. If it makes you feel more comfortable, when someone asks you what you're reading, you can say, “Oh, this? It's . . . an examination of the loss of myth in modern culture.”

And it wouldn't be a lie.

I really don't believe in faeries. But I really
want
to. Not just for me, but for all of us. Because we are battered by adulthood—by taxes, by loss, by laundry, by nine to five, by deceit and distrust, by the crushing desire to be thin, wealthy, successful, popular, happy, in love. All the while, we are walking on a planet that is disintegrating around us.

 

I would have thought this challenge insurmountable, had I not already encountered one such believer. And she just so happened to live in my building.

I first met Raven Keyes not long after I moved into my first apartment in New York City. She and her husband, Michael, lived down the hall, and it wasn't long before Raven and I were on a first-name basis. With her blond, curly hair and playful blue eyes, Raven exuded a warm effervescence that melted most people into a puddle of bashful smiles and adoration. I was no exception. She was a former actress turned Reiki Master, a tradition with which I was completely unfamiliar. Reiki, she explained, was an alternative form of healing where the practitioner moves their hands over your body without touching you. I was intrigued but had to admit at the time that for me, the best type of therapy was found either on the opulent sofa of an Upper West Side shrink, or the lavender-infused massage table at Bliss Spa on Lexington Avenue.

However, our perfunctory chats in the hallway evolved into glasses of wine, and before I knew it, a year or two passed and I was volunteering my apartment for use as her Reiki studio during the days, in exchange for a small monthly fee.

Raven's clients were aplenty, and due to long hours at work my apartment was typically empty, so it worked out perfectly. In any case, it was Raven who first let me know that my apartment was filled, very certainly, I mean chockablock, with faeries. She just came right out and said it.

You can imagine my surprise.

After two years of living in that apartment, not once had I been woken in the middle of the night by a tiny ring of creatures dancing merrily around my ficus tree. Nor had I been pricked, prodded, tripped, or poked, and no imaginary toddler had ever wandered off into the depths of my dark closet only to find its way home again days later with a frightening, changeling-like look on its face. In other words, I had no evidence of an alien occupation of my remarkably modest living space.

Not to mention, everybody knows that faeries don't exist.

At least not anymore
, a small voice from the depths of my imagination said.

Shut up
, I told it. Because they don't. Every adult learns this. Yet I found I was moved by Raven's innocence, and I suspected I was somehow mourning the loss of mine.

With my neighbor's startling declaration that there were, in fact, faeries in my apartment, it really got me thinking.

In the last few centuries, the archeological community has made some fairly astonishing discoveries, many of which point to the alarming number of myths and legends that possess at least a thread of historical basis. One great example is Troy, the legendary city at the center of Homer's
Iliad
—now thought to have been located near the coast of northwest Turkey. Everyone thought that German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann was completely out of his gourd when he began to dig on a hill in the Turkish countryside in search of the mythical city. But by following geographical descriptions from the text, Schliemann's obsession was rewarded when he found layers upon layers of a city that had been burned, pummeled to destruction, and rebuilt (about thirteen times). Among many other conclusive discoveries, archeologists have since unearthed shards of pottery that date to the time period that Homer's epic work so definitively describes, as well as urns that stored grains and foodstuffs—in such great quantity that historians concluded the inhabitants were trying to store up for years while their walled city was under siege.

In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth paid ten thousand pounds—about the cost of an entire castle—for a unicorn horn. I kid you not. Ancient Greek natural-history writers had begun describing the creature as early as the fifth century BC. Soon thereafter, writings chronicling the discovery of this mythical beast could be found across the world, from China and Japan to the streets of Israel in texts from the Old Testament. By the sixteenth century, the existence of unicorns was so generally accepted that the average medieval person would have been able to speculate on a unicorn's height, weight, and even their diet. It wasn't until later in human history that we discovered these sea creatures called narwhals with proboscises that look suspiciously similar to the horn of the fabled unicorn. But by then, the hunting and trading of the narwhal tusk had allowed the myth of the unicorn to thrive for centuries. Queen Elizabeth would have been none too pleased, I imagine, to learn she'd forked over the price of a castle for a mere whale tusk.

As time passes and we continue to find empirical evidence of the various truths that underlie myth, I continue to wonder if the whole idea of faeries couldn't somehow fit into a similar equation.

That faeries were a part of my imaginary world growing up was not surprising. As a professor at Cornell University, my father nourished me and my older sister with Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, and pretty much any other magical, swashbuckling tale from his meticulously alphabetized library (or the depths of his fanciful imagination). There were make-believe games and long walks in the woods, where he'd tell us tales of trolls, giants, brave Native Americans, or the Greek gods with their water nymphs and torrid affairs. At playtime I'd imagine I could talk to the faeries, that I could see them flying around our vegetable garden on little transparent wings. The highlight of my after-school career was playing Wendy in
Peter Pan
, sporting a bright blue flannel nightgown my mother bought me at Woolworths. I was devastated that Tinker Bell could despise me.

Our family wasn't particularly religious in any traditional sense, which is probably why, as an adult, I didn't feel so weird taking an interest in the truth behind the existence of magical beings. In fact, for me, “religion” boiled down to conversations with God in the bathroom.

It sounds bizarre, I'm sure, but I began to associate God and bathrooms when I was in third and fourth grades, in the years when my parents were constantly arguing, or when my father, beet red on a Tuesday morning, yelled at me for leaving my shoes in the middle of the living-room floor or for not drinking all of my orange juice. In those days, I was in tears most mornings before breakfast. I don't delight in describing my father this way; he was an exceptional man. He could quote Chaucer at length in Middle English. He taught us to swim, ski, hike, rock climb, survive in the wilderness. But my father possessed a deep-seated frustration that seemed to eat at him. Disappointment simmered in a vat somewhere beneath his skin until it erupted explosively in terrible bouts of anger. More than anything, Alan Pike wanted to be a great American novelist. Stories lived in him—hauntingly broken tales about Tibetan Longumpas and lone explorers, and he wove them aloud from time to time for friends over a glass of whiskey. But he never put a single word to paper. He couldn't.

When you have a gift and you stifle it, it will consume you. My father tried to force it down by smoking marijuana, by drinking double Gibsons with extra onions, you know, just enough to take the edge off. And at age forty-eight, he found himself with a wife who loved him but could no longer live with him and a family coming apart at the seams. While my sister gracefully tiptoed around his moods, I was too oblivious (or defiant) to take him seriously. As a result, I bore the brunt of his fury.

In third grade, during Mr. Yale's class, I would requisition the hall pass and retreat to the bathrooms, which during class time, were blissful, spacious, private. There, I didn't have to pretend to be a happy, normal kid. I could sit and, for just a few moments, allow myself to feel the way I was feeling. It was there, next to the discarded paper towels and bits of unused toilet paper, that I could ask for what I really wanted and feel that someone, or
something
, might actually be able to hear me. Since then, the bathroom has been my own personal church of sorts. When most women retreat to the ladies' room to powder their nose, I retreat for a spiritual tune-up.

When I began to look at my life in a different way, I wondered how many people, like me, needed to seek God in the bathroom. The world is falling apart, and outside the playground is splintered and dark. Where can we go in our daily lives to feel the things we need to feel? To feel the soothing balm of faith? To feel loved? Safe? Happy? What about hopeful?