Lisa Locascio

Laszlo's Discernment

Six Visions

Laszlo knelt between the Wizard’s legs and took his cock in her mouth. No hands, only the reach of her neck, parted teeth, tongue. He slid against the smooth inside of her cheeks. When she tongued his urethra he gave a smooth little sigh of relaxation and she had to stop herself from grinning and biting him. 

The second vision was just the organ itself. His, held squarely in her gaze. She’d never dreamt of a man’s cock only. The image had always included an evident edge of corpus. But she saw the Wizard’s alone, draped in pearlescent skin. That was the thing—most men’s, she couldn’t, until after she did. You know—in real life.

In the third they sprawled on a bed—a hotel bed, she was sure—beside long windows, drapes drawn. He lapped between her legs. She on her back, knees akimbo, breasts rising. When she cut to her own perspective—she could shift cameras like that, she could see anything—she liked to sub in a favorite image of him from her mirror. How he’d look, down there. Blue eyes, winsome smile. He opened and she opened and off they went.

Fourth she stood before him and simply and carefully disrobed. He, clothed, didn’t move. She just wanted him to see her. Bare. And he saw her and did not touch her. The Wizard became naked, too, his clothes melting from his body. And she saw him and did not touch him.

In the latest vision, they were naked in bed, the hotel room telescoping around them. Laszlo curled up, her knees raised and held to the left. He knelt and with a gesture like opening a giant book parted her raised knees to reveal her sex, shine-rosy as a conch shell the Wizard pressed the flat of his hand against. 

They shuddered. Looked each other in the eyes. The vision ended. 

Sometimes she thought this was when he penetrated her. After she couldn’t see anymore. Other times, she thought they just stayed like that, staring with abandon. 

She wasn’t even sure she wanted to have sex with him. The Wizard, whose true name she did not know. Although he came to her this way in visions, she struggled to see the act itself. Yet it was all she dreamt of, in those days. It confused her to long so fitfully and yet be incapable of drawing the encounter. She who had trained so many years in manifestation.

Then one day it came to Laszlo all at once. He would visit her chamber. It didn’t matter which: the sumptuous quarters at her family seat, where she had spent her first years, her spare cell at the Witch-Nunnery, her stateroom on the ship that had borne her on her honeymoon. Wherever it was, the Wizard was there. They would have some exchange—here, for once in her life, words did not matter—that led the Wizard to turn Laszlo, pin her against a wall, lean his whole weight into her aching back. Merge her.

Matrimonios Confidenciales

As was her custom, Laszlo had married her husband immediately after their first lovemaking. They found each other in a dive bar in the old part of a port city where they were both strangers, a dingy place called Café O’Lay. A tall man with eyes like chips of ice, a medium woman with mauve hair. She could no longer remember what they drank. When she told the story, Laszlo said that Café O’Lay offered two brews on draught, lethe and nepenthe. She and her husband had ordered mixed doubles until neither remembered what they were sad about. 

Her husband. That was already his name, before they even left the bar. He wore a cape of green velvet and carried a dagger in his belt. She had felt like the merriest brown hen in creation as they spilled out of Café O’Lay and into the violet evening. They were drunk and drink was the currency of the nation they had entered. Their bodies kept time down a wide boulevard littered with trash under trumpet trees raining pink blossoms. In the shadow of the tall buildings, it was almost cold. In that summer twilight. She took his hand. He wrapped her in his cape. 

Oh, love. Is it a story or the story, the way the two of them bound together that night? It happened under the boardwalk, in sand gritty with blue glass and cigarette butts and the occasional nail and long drinking straw wrappers. Laszlo and her husband were not old, but they had borne the world’s fangs. Now they felt its caress. Were held in its great womb, bathed in beneficent effluvia. 

Night came, dimming the slats above them to gray smudges on black. Laszlo’s husband took his hands from her body. He had kept his doublet on during the act. Now he parted its halves to reveal a soft pale chest. His paucity of chest hair shocked Laszlo, given his recent performance.

After he had opened his shirt, Laszlo’s new husband split his flesh. She became very still, suspended within the gelatinous feeling new magic always gave her. 

He swung wide the doors of his ribcage and showed her his heart, beating inside a glass cage. He pressed his hand to her sternum. Laszlo felt a sharp pain. Then forgetting washed over the hurt. 

When her husband took his hand away she saw a piece of tissue in his palm, veiny and torn. Her hand flew to the skin between her breasts. It was smooth. 

She watched her husband open the little door to the glass cage that held his heart and push inside the thing he had taken from her. 

Above, the moon transited. 

When she found her words, they were “I love you.”

The ground moved. She looked up. They weren’t under the boardwalk anymore but on the deck of a polished wooden sailboat making a grand white V of wake, far from shore.

“Are we at sea?” Laszlo asked her husband.

“Isn’t it interesting,” he murmured, not looking at her. “How the horizon is always the same.”

For Six Months I Barely Spoke

“You can come upstairs when the numbers work,” Dera told her, swinging through the beads and across Laszlo’s bedroll in her muddy boots as her student flailed, caught in the heroic scale abacus that occupied the Witch-Nunnery’s sub-basement. Laszlo, long since done with her coursework, was now trying to pass her exams. 

Nearly a decade had passed since the night Dera had found Laszlo in the snow. If Laszlo had come to understand anything over the course of her time at the Witch-Nunnery, it was that Dera required fear. Fear was her greatest wealth and sole vice. Thinking of the joy Dera had denied herself in order to become Directrice—the joy Laszlo’s own mother had claimed when at forty she finally let her concubinus impregnate her and left the Witch-Nunnery to make an honest man of him, the joy Laszlo had planned on, too, before she met her husband—Laszlo was always moved to tears. She let Dera terrorize and abuse her whenever she wanted. Both of them had known for three years now that Laszlo’s magic was crescendoing past Dera’s. 

“I’m trying,” Laszlo said, setting the wooden globes swinging against each other, her lips moving as she caught the figures in her head.

Dera stilled all of them, ruining hours of work. She fixed Laszlo in her vision, looking delighted, daring her to protest. Laszlo remembered to quiver. 

“Where’s your paramour?” Dera cooed, stroking a globe. “Your inamorato?” 

“I don’t have one,” Laszlo said, trying to keep the numbers in her head. “I’m married. Remember?”

Dera smirked. “Yes, I remember the little garden party your fancy parents paid for. So. Your husband. Where?”

“On his ship.” Laszlo stared not at Dera but at the globe she held, wishing but not sending for it to burst into flames. She could restrain herself. 

Dera began to pace. “Ah, right. You married a man of the sea. And you live in the sub-basement of the Witch-Nunnery while he gallivants around, a whore in every port—” 

The globe nearest Dera’s head exploded. Embarrassed, Laszlo marshaled her deeper self, dredging her animus for the fine net of protection she was able to drop over Dera before the splinters reached the face she no longer saw as ugly but dear and rich with knowledge.

“He is faithful,” she shouted at Dera, having protected her. 

Dera flicked the net away, letting the fragments of the abacus bead fall. “You are as impulsive as the night I met you. I doubt that you will ever leave this basement. I’m not here to debate your melancholy sailor. I have a task for you.”

Laszlo sniffed. “Does it involve leaving the basement?”

Dera smiled, her wrinkles and scars parting like clouds. “Go get Val and the rest of your team into their harnesses. I need you to retrieve someone from the port.” She put her hand to Laszlo’s cheek and for a moment dropped her anger. “You’ll like him. Maybe even fall a little in love.” 

How ridiculous, Laszlo thought as she and her passenger rode silently back down the ice road from the port. In the two hours they had spent together, the man had said barely two words to her. He’d strode right up to her quayside, immediately draping himself in a gauze spell so that she couldn’t even get much of a look at him. All Laszlo could make out was that he wasn’t very tall, his hair was darkish, and his eyes were bright blue. His age: older. He wore some lush crimson fabric.

“Hello,” Laszlo said, turning, smiling, when he approached. “You must be—”

“Ready to go,” he said peremptorily, turning and led her to her sleigh. Laszlo trailed him, feeling sharp and cold. 

She fumed the whole drive, bidding Val forward but not really, idly letting her directions to the cats dissemble until she stopped directing them at all, figuring they knew the way after all these years, and indeed, the cats pressed onward, taking the best route. To their left the sun poured like white wine through the sieve of the naked trees. Laszlo let herself look at it too long and then had to shut her eyes for the remainder of the trip, trying to quiet the flashing purple bean that danced across her inner darkness. 

Val led the team around the grand circular drive that marked the hidden entrance to the Witch-Nunnery and Laszlo collected herself, ready to call up the opening, the purple bean still daunting her. But when she opened her eyes the orange mouth was already open, waiting, and the man was looking at her. 

“Keep your eyes closed,” he said sternly. “It’s the only way to get rid of your purple bean.” 

She shut her eyes immediately, as if he’d spelled her. But he hadn’t. And in the moment Laszlo had looked at the man, he’d dropped his gauze, and she had seen his face. Pale, lined, with deep set eyes and bushy brows, and a mouth well-split from smiling and a broad nose. She was surprised how much she liked it. 

“What brings you to the Witch-Nunnery?” she asked, blind. 

“I hate small talk,” the man said.

“Oh, okay,” Laszlo said. “Forgive me for—”

“Stop it,” he said, shaking his head. “Stop it. You’re in a mood. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I do,” Laszlo said, “Stop using cheap tricks to read my mind.”

His laugh was full, throaty, but also somehow feminine. 

“I get it. Dera is too much. She always has been—it’s not because she’s older now, or because she’s Directrice, like you generously think. She’s just cold and closed off. Especially with you, because she can sense the magnitude of your power. It vibrates off of you.”

Laszlo thanked him, automatically discarding the praise. He’d lose any ambition to sneak into her chamber as soon as he saw her bedroll under the abacus.

“Don’t thank me yet. Dera has taught you well but there is further to go, much further.” The man stared at her, unbothered.

“I’ve been here seven years,” Laszlo said through her teeth. “I’m just figuring out now where to go next. Because I have so many options.”

“That’s a sweet lie, and I like that you like me enough to lie to me,” he said. She had the feeling that he was stroking her face, but he was not. When she examined the feeling, she realized it was more like he had reached inside her skull to stroke her brain. “Dera’s never going to be anything less than a cunt to you. It’s the only way she knows to maintain her power and respect yours at the same time. What you’re waiting for is to see how long you can stand it, and if that husband of yours will get it together in the meantime, right? Or if he’s going to float in the sea of his sadness forever?”

Laszlo stared at him, steadying her desire to flame his face into a call for Val, who came to crouch at her heels and hissed. 

“Good kitty.” He smiled. “Nice pussy.”

She expected to feel so angry, but instead there was a thawing in her chest. Laszlo flushed, confused. He was seeing her clearly. Her training was nothing against his power. 

Why hadn’t Dera told her she was dealing with a wizard?

“Because she didn’t want you to perform for me,” the Wizard said gently. “Because she wanted you to herself. But I already told you that. It’s cold. We should go inside. Your cat is going to eat me if I keep you out here any longer, which is saying something given how impressively you’ve trained her. She kept the team on track after you dropped your messaging. It was incredible, really.” 

He held his hand out to Val, who licked it, purring confusedly. 

“Before we go in for that pageant, listen to me,” the Wizard said. “Nobody has done you the service of telling you what is written in your face before. Laszlo. Ruler-warrior-saint. But you’re not any of those things, are you?”

“Did Dera tell you my name?”

He smiled. “What you have is a talent for intimacy. What you have is the ability to feel for others what pains them to feel for themselves. What you need is to dance out your perceptions. Sing them. What you want is to bring yourself into higher vibrational alignment. Don’t turn away. What is bringing you forward is the anchor, the weight that sank you. They are the same. Feel your heaviness and you will be light as a bird’s hollow bones. Feel your lightness and you will be steady as a stone on the earth.”  

Laszlo didn’t think she was crying until she felt the tears on her cheek. The Wizard disappeared into the orange mouth. Val nosed her knee, purring so hard she melted the ice beneath their feet. Together, they went inside. 

The next evening Laszlo sat in the front row of the amphitheater and watched the Wizard demonstrate his magic, which he did with an offhand, nearly embarrassed flair, calling tableaux of the prehistory of angels down onto the stage. Laszlo had studied this period, even had the opportunity to handle the illuminated manuscripts in the Witch-Nunnery’s vast catacomb archive, but none of that could have prepared her for seeing the angels’ language and customs take shape in the air before her. Flame writ on the stilled breath of ancestors, illuminated with their joy at meeting the next world. The angels’ faces were bright spots where she couldn’t look even as she looked. The Wizard read out his spells carefully, in a tone of hypnotic reverence. Laszlo’s mouth hung open as, behind him on her Directrice’s dais, Dera openly sobbed. 

When it was over, the Wizard walked offstage without looking back. Laszlo realized that her hands were in fists. When she opened her left hand, she found a single white feather.

The Hanged Man

For her final month at the Witch-Nunnery Laszlo was in a terror. Adrift in a vast morass of plastic, her husband had fallen under a maelstrom’s allurement. He sent her missives about the intensity of his new love. 

She calls to me with the utter certainty of my worthlessness and strokes my ear with her tongue of destruction. She never bores me by suggesting I am of worth. She is with me always. I hear her roar and know I am wanted. I know I am wanted because I am nothing. 

Laszlo had hit a weakness in her magical progress, a blurry place like the soft spot on a baby’s head. When she sent to lasso her husband in his usual rose net, he drifted just out of her range like a naughty child. When she spoke the words to charm him against self-harm, they mumbled into nothing in her mouth. The worst part was that she couldn’t figure it out. What she was doing wrong, why he didn’t want to be saved. 

Once, her husband had held her as she said the closing spell to end a sleigh cat’s life. The cat Yarrow was old, over forty, and had lived a powerful span. But it hurt no less. She could barely get the words out as she smoked the holy root over her friend’s panting, emaciated body. And then she said the final phrase, and Yarrow’s breath ceased immediately. Her paw, held in Laszlo’s sweaty hand, was immediately ice. 

“Her paw is so cold,” Laszlo said, stunned.

“She has new paws now,” her husband said, and kissed her. 

But now he was far away, in love with a whirlpool that loved his death, and he did not care for her suffering. In whom could she confide that she had learned that the Wizard, too, had married young, a folly, and was utterly devoted to his wife. He said. Who betrayed him. He said. 

Placement Seminar

“You must learn that no one will show you their true face,” said Dera, crossing the room in Xs. She wore a vivid wine wrap above mud-encrusted snowboots. From her left ear dangled a single black pearl. Sometimes she waved her arms. “No one will want the intimacy you imagine they desire as you do. The emotions and tenderness that you show as an animal shows its belly will harm you when you are trying to be helped. You cannot be harder than you are except for as the world makes you. Accept these details of your existence. Move yourself through the meshes and patterns of your life and learn to hold yourself apart. Do not think that others fear your power when in fact they are most likely not thinking about you. If they are thinking of you they are coveting you or otherwise damning you. Recognize that to live in the minds of others is a curse and a gift that you can manipulate as part of your magic. It is a burden to practice such manipulation and it is a gift to be invisible to others. Pretend to be dead as a way of strengthening your will to live. Recognize there are mysteries your magic will never penetrate, which is the root of magic itself. Go to the dark places and revere the fear they build in you. The Wizard is who you want him to be, a man without an identity who uses his flint of magic to ignite your frustrated desire. Your husband is not who you want him to be, and if you love him you will free him to the sea with which he is so clearly enraptured and the death for which he so deeply longs. Men are diverting, but they are not the answer. Those two were given bad magic they seek to rub off on you. You need someone clean and you will find them. You hate me for saying these things, but I say them because I love you, and I will never see you again after you graduate. You don’t want to believe any of this, but it is true, as it has been with everything I have ever taught you.”

Commencement

Laszlo’s robe was gold velvet. Her parents bought it for her, as well as the matching jesses for Val. They came down from the north country to the verdant meadow where the ceremony was to be held. They were freer since they had sold their estate, and smaller, almost miniature in the afternoon sun.

When the time came Laszlo stood in the field with her mother and father and Val, who chased a bumblebee to the strained limits of the jesses. Laszlo had hoped her husband would come, but he did not show. Nor Dera. Nor the Wizard. The little party stood waiting, three humans, one cat, expecting that someone would tell them what to do.

Her husband had sent her a letter from the depths of his purple sea. I will stay in the place where I am known, with your heart in my cage. She understood this to be their divorce.

The Wizard was with his wife. Even now she felt his magic ebbing, and she struggled to remember why she had conjured him so dearly, why her magic always surged forth in that way, in the tears she coaxed from her body when in moments of solitude she yelled with handmade pleasure.

“Expect nothing but that the experience was meaningful in ways that will continue to be revealed,” Dera had said. 

Everything she had ever been taught cut Laszlo, and she had so loved learning.

Eventually a change came over the field, the air shifting to violet, to indigo, although it remained the center of the day; and Laszlo understood that she was passing into another phase as surely as she knew, deeply, suddenly, that Val’s life had reached its midpoint and that her friend the big cat would now begin a slow decline, the way light is one minute shorter each day after the summer solstice, and Laszlo hated this knowledge as she hated all the days between the solstice and the vernal equinox. 

She felt in her robe’s pocket for a magic rock. Val lapped the top of her foot through her sandal. Her parents looked at her, proud, as Laszlo withdrew a purple bean and held it before her eyes. 

Lisa Locascio's work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Believer, Tin House, n+1, and No Tokens, among many other magazines. Her first novel, Open Me, was a New York Times Editor's Choice. Lisa is Core Faculty in the Antioch University Los Angeles MFA in Creative Writing program and Executive Director of the Mendocino Coast Writers' Conference. She lives in Los Angeles.