A Wizard Sat Next to Me

by Alex Valdiers

It was a sunny and warm day, boys were wearing shorts, girls were wearing light dresses. Except for me; I had run out of dresses and swimwear. On that day, whilst aunt Diva did the great wash, I took a day out from the house and out from the beach.

I wore my blue-striped shirt and jeans, not very feminine, and I walked around Gaillac’s town center. The sun was hitting hard, and I regretted not borrowing one of aunt Diva’s straw hats. I looked good in straw hats at that age, the age of innocence, which I took an impertinent pleasure of prolonging late in my twenties. He said I could have fooled him for a sixteen-year old, the wizard who sat next to me.

Tired of the incessantly harassing sun, I looked for a shelter in the shade and a place to rest. I sat at an empty table, against a wall which turned out to be the hydrotrain station wall. A garçon quickly came to take my order, and I ordered an ice cream instinctively, just because I felt like it, without checking if I had enough cash to pay for it.

When the garçon brought the ice cream over — dragon-tears chocolate chip — I still hadn’t opened my purse to count my silver coins. I didn’t want the disappointment of finding out I was short to spoil the enjoyment of this ice cream, away from the tyrant sun. A cool breeze caressed my skin, it slipped below the cloth of my blue-striped shirt and made it flutter above my chest like a flag above town hall proudly waving the colors of the young girls in flowers.

He sat next to me, the wizard. There were plenty of free tables on the terrace, the station was calm that day, only a few pedestrians populated the streets, none too hasty; nobody rushed in resort towns, much less in Gaillac. He grunted, bickered aloud about some timetable confusion, pestered about the clerk at the ticket office, and he moved his chair two or three times, each time the wicker chair creaked under his weight.

I didn’t look at him. The garçon had placed a very small spoon inside the ice cream glass and I took tiny spoonfuls of dragon-tears chocolate chip. Partly because the ice cream was too cold for my teeth, partly because I wanted to make the pleasure last and delay the dreadful moment I’d have to reach for my purse, push those rusty flaps open and find out whether or not I would make a gracious exit from the station café.

The wizard must have noticed the peculiar way I was eating the ice cream, because he paused his symphony of unsavory grunts and wild gestures and, from the corner of my eye, I saw his head titled my way. Why did he have to sit right next to me, against the wall? The terrace was mostly empty and he could have picked any other wicker chairs, at any other tables.

Ordinarily, I would have been suspicious; there were plenty of boys who tried all sorts of approaches to seduce me. But I had sensed, by the abrupt way he rushed into my quiet scene, that he hadn’t noticed me. There was no prior design to assail my chastity and, in a way, I am sure it is the way he tells the story now, if he ever mentions our rencontre, he would say that I was the one who seduced him. It was the peculiar way I ate the dragon-tears ice cream that day.

“Whoever made a spoon so small is a fool,” he said. It was the first time I ever heard his husky, ancient yet youthful voice, full of contrarieties. I dared a glance at him, his forehead was sweating, his nose was sharp and long, he kept his hair longer than mine. His eyes were enormous and an intense black. I could almost see my reflection in his pupils: all my ginger hair and freckles and a faint smile that I tried hard to dissimulate.

“I think it’s an espresso spoon.” I said, not looking at him. Then I glanced furtively, wiped a faint smile and took a quick half spoonful of my ice cream. “The waiter must have made a mistake.”

As I said this, the wizard covered his right eye, the one further from me and concentrated, hard, until he made his wicker chair creak and the table in front of him tilt. “It’s no mistake,” he said, uncovering his eye. “They’ve run out of clean regular spoons.”

I giggled like a child, my lips covered in chocolate chip. “How do you know?” I asked, and he told me he was a wizard. He had a very cool and natural demeanor. He earned another glance from me. This time, I saw that every bone of his visage was prominent, his cheeks were gaunt, and he was very pale, yet his complexion was dark, almost fire-tangerine. He wasn’t a bad picture to look at. But I didn’t care for boys back then and even less for grown men, much less those who had the pretension to be wizards.

He asked me what my name was, and I took my time to delicately pronounce each of the three syllables of Isobel. I guess I had a spark in my eyes, I made my nose twitch and this time I kept my smile in place. I even stuck the tip of my tongue out, between my teeth, as a cat would. I flashed him a cat smile, knowing exactly what I was doing but not knowing why I was doing it. I guess, back then, I still believed flirting was harmless. What an innocent fool I was!

The wizard half-covered his left eye, for not even a second, and then his voice changed completely. He became agitated once more but, this time, he wasn’t grunting about missed connections, he was talking to me, about me, about him and me.

“Sure, we could get married. I could sweep you off your feet, here and there. I’ll buy you a ticket to Lohrgren. We’ll spend a week at my little house by the shore of the eternal sea, where the water is always warm and the tide always high. We’ll run after each other on the beach and when you’ll trip, I’ll pretend I’d trip too, and we roll over on the sand, and I would kiss you and, for the first time, you will tell me you love me.

“Then, after our escapade ended, we’ll come back here to pick your luggage. You’ll kiss your aunt Diva goodbye and tell her not to worry, that you’re in love and happy. We’ll travel together to Urgran to meet your parents and, on the hydrotrain, you’ll be pacing around the corridor, making baby steps out of childhood.

“At the doorstep of your family house on 27, Roevel St, your father would refuse to shake my hand, but your mother would kiss me and lead us both inside the house. It would take an entire lunch for your father, Fregorn, to relax. And, after dessert he would open his acajou box he keeps on the Travelian mantelpiece, he would pick up four cigars and offer one to each of us. ‘You might as well enjoy my cigars too,’ he would say to me, ‘you’ve already stolen the most precious person in my life.’ I would tell him he was wrong, but it would be a lie.”

The wizard moved his wicker chair closer to me. I marveled as I listened to him, letting the ice cream in my spoon melt and drip onto the table.

“We’ll settle in Azuyan, at the border of the Obelisk valley, because my appointment as lead council mage would come through. We’ll be very happy there, especially you. You’ll discover a new part of the world, you’ll get into magic; it’s so easy to drain there. You’ll have lots of petty jobs, a lot of friends and even an affair, and I’ll pretend I wouldn’t know about it. It’s hard to compete with another woman, especially when she is as charming as she is a powerful witch. So we’ll move out, after only two years. I’d get fired from the council on purpose to have a solid reason to tear you away from the happiest times of your life. Jealousy. I won’t be able to fight it.”

Only then did the garçon come to us to bring him a glass of green amonyte, the poison of wizards. He drank it in one gulp, then, on several occasions during his long speech about our common future, he would tip the neck of the glass with the back of his index nail and the glass would fill up again with amonyte.

“When you’ll be thirty, you’ll look twenty-one. But when you’ll be thirty-one, we’ll have a child, Albi, and you’ll look thirty-one. It would mark the start of your destructive obsession with rejuvenating magic. You’ll want to go back to the innocent days when you’d spend the summers at your aunt Diva’s rockhill house in Gaillac.” And he pointed precisely in the direction where aunt Diva’s house stood.

“You’ll become like so many people who had it easy too early, who were born too pretty for their own sake. You’ll stop painting, drawing even, and you’ll become superficial, addicted to vice and magic. Oh, you’ll become powerful; need is a powerful ally, and you’ll drain like a genuine witch, although you’ll never get your certificate.

“You’ll look twenty-one again until our own child looked older than you. You’ll pretend not to see it for a while, when taking him shopping after class, in Zuma, where we would live the bulk of our life together. You’ll chuckle when guessing the enquiring looks of strangers supposed your were not his mother but his sister, or even his girlfriend.

“But Albi wouldn’t like it, and he will make you stop. How can you find a lover of your own when you parade around town with the prettiest girl in Carmenghast? So, after countless arguments with our son, you’ll stop. And suddenly, you’ll look fifty and, in dropping your mask, you’ll rob me of an excuse I’d used for years for not joining the Carmelyte party and put my magic for the use of the people in need.

“For years, I would know it was my calling, where magic and sense guided me, out there in the trenches at the edge of Carmenghast, but I’ll remain in Zuma, to be with you and Albi, because until late in our lives, I would love you as strongly as I love you now.”

He drank another amonyte, his third, and each time he put the glass down, his speech slurred more and his wizard eyes dropped lower on his face. I suspected, from that third glass, as he prepared himself to talk about our dark days together, that this somber premonition resulted from the amonyte attacking his senses rather that his magic eye reading our joint future.

“Way past my point of no return, when draining magic would have finally drained me, I would realize that I failed my life by falling in love with you. All those goals, all those great things I could have done as a wizard, all wasted because I became too comfortable, because I refused to leave you, even for a day.

“And then, being seventy-one, looking a hundred and one, I would begin to resent you. You’d be fifty, looking fifty, but still attractive, still raising a wave of onlookers as you cross the street. And you’ll take a lover again, because you could, because I’ll have developed a nasty heavy hand habit, and because you’ll need to feel young and beautiful, one more time, until the end of time.

“You’ll expect grandchildren, but we’ll never get any. Braver and bolder than I’ll ever be, our son will join the forces, fighting for our borders. He would never come back to us, and the news of his death under these particular circumstances will break you.

“Albi wouldn’t die behind enemy lines, he would die in his sleep, his life sucked out of him by a jealous lover, a wizard who would take his own life after taking our Albi’s life, down to the abyss, in the Wayworld where pure wizard spirits burn forever. Our poor son, killed for lust. You’ll never get over it.”

He picked up his fifth glass of amonyte, his lips trembling. He drank not half of it and dropped the rest. The amonyte sizzled his cloak, and an odor I’ve never forgotten filled my lungs; it was the smell of Aldrich eggs in cress, thick and creamy. I could taste it on my tongue. I almost choked, and he had drunk four and half glasses of this poison.

The wizard closed his eyes, looking like he could fall asleep at any moment. Mesmerized by his insight into our future together, I hadn’t realized I still held the ice cream cup in my hand. I put it down. The dragon-tears had melted, losing their shape and their attraction, like the wizard sitting next to me.

Then he stood up in a single effortless motion, as if levitating out of the wicker chair. He waved a hat I hadn’t realized he had and walked off towards the hydrotrain platforms without a word, without a smile, without even a look.

When he was ten steps away from our joint future, I stopped him with my honeyed, nubile voice. “I’ve never been to Lohrgren.”

He twisted his neck towards me.

“I hear it’s beautiful in the summer.” I tapped the spoon against the ice cream glass and brought it to my lips. I put its curvy side flat against my tongue and sucked out the last remnant of dragon-tears.

Then I held it there, because he looked at me, and I knew what a delightful picture that little spoon painted of me; the ginger girl with freckles who ate ice cream with an espresso spoon at the Gaillac train station. “Something tells me,” I said, sliding the spoon away from my lips. “That I shall be very happy there.” And I smiled. And the wizard smiled too. And our lives were never the same again.