Psi Tales: The Shapeshifters

Tyler’s note: Hi all, I’m still hard at work revising the first draft of book one. In the meantime, here is one of the in-universe shorts from that book.

The drumbeats thud through trombone wails and piano chords, vibrating her insides: an entrainment, a message…a – she blinks – a spell?

Then they drop off, abruptly. Time turns viscous, magmatic, as the drumstick twirls end-over-end across the room. A hand shoots out – pluck!

And Jill Nakamura is surprised: the hand is her own. Inside of Jill’s awe there is the hand, her hand, seemingly receptive to stage directions from unknown corners. That’s how it is now, she thinks, we’ve been ”Opened.” She rolls the black drumstick across her palm. It shines lengthwise in the red and purple light.

Without a glance, she can feel the audience waiting. She can feel the drummer, attentive in her drum-seat behind the band.

Jill looks up. The drummer: cheekbones dark and sleek as the drumstick, eyelashes thick like a snare-brush, eyes B-flat blue with hip-length braids. The woman’s nose shines with…what? It must be a septum ring. Jill is too deep into the audience to see, and too distracted by the twin lightening that zags from the drummer’s eyes as if to Frankenstein-animate the inner walls of Jill’s organs.

The drummer, rising. Slowly. She’s framed by the dazzle beyond, past the glass back wall: a billion electric pixies shimmer – lit windows of the skyline. They shimmer in synchrony, just like the people behind them. That’s how it is now. It’s prettier than the synchrony she’d seen in the streets, where a MAGA swarm exchanged blows with leftists in Times Square.

But here she was in the city, needing to know.

The drummer, from the stage, palming out her hand for the drumstick. “I’ll take that back,” in an elegant English accent.

The whole of Dizzy’s Club – Lincoln Center socialites, here to pretend that the end isn’t nigh – turning. They stare at Jill with more than sight.

Jill takes a moment to register the drummer’s request. Then she scoots her chair back with a screech, the only sound in the room. Dizzy’s patrons part like red seas in red light for Jill to approach the stage.

The drummer does not meet Jill at the foot of the stage. That would be too easy. She wants to see what Jill will do. She stays behind her kit, unmoving, palm out.

An unspoken exchange through their messy new medium:

Jill, squinting, head cocked: Do I know you?

Drummer, hint of a smile: I hope you solve that riddle for yourself, darling. It has nothing to do with me.

Jill: You want me to climb this stage?

Drummer: I’m waiting.

Jill readies her arm. A toss, attempted. The trombonist ducks as the drumstick spirals past his head and clatters atop the piano.

Jill, shrugging: You asked for it.

Drummer, shrugging back: Guess you’ll never find out then.

The drummer moves her gaze over the rest of the audience. Then she draws her empty hand through the air, splayed fingers, all five twiddling, magic fingers.

Uh oh. The audience tenses. They’re not here for that kind of magic. A few suddenly have pause about the unlocking of the city-wide lockdown, which they were here to celebrate.

Five fingers dive down beneath the drummer’s knees. They return with: a new drumstick. The audience laughs as Jill’s face grows hot. The drummer – nice try, darling – winks, spins the new stick, dextrous, and rat-tat-tats into the next tune.

—

“This way, sweetie.”

The trombonist’s hand drags Jill off her heels while his heels, stiletto’d, clack the two of them through the post-show lingerers.

“Ray! You lost this” – a man dangles a gold hoop for the trombonist.

“Oh” – a sassy oh – “thanks.” The trombonist, no pause in his walk, picks it from between the man’s fingers…what’s his name again? Not that it matters. Sassy.

“You all popping bottles tonight?” the man asks.

Mm, overeager.

“Sorry, Charlie,” the trombonist, reuniting hoop and ear, leaving Charlie-or-whatever-his-name-is in their wake. “Maybe next time.”

Green room, past the pianist.

Pianist to Trombone Ray: “Who’s she?”

“No idea,” Ray over his shoulder, “She’s been summoned.”

New door, then another, then a long hall past the kitchen – industrial, countertops gleaming. Trombone Ray leads the way, straight-spined and sinuous as Jill walks behind. Jill watches the step of his stilettos roll up through the pelvis to sway the base of his neck – subtle, regal, hallway like a runway. A left. Sharp right. Stairwell, and up, and out. White lights and a hallway until a nondescript door. The artist’s suite.

Ray, finally turning to face her, a smirk, and a grandiose door-opening gesture: This way m’lady.

A wall of sound explodes out the open portal. Jill pictures her curls being swooshed back. The artist’s suite is thick with intrigue and entourage: secrets whispered and cackled at, lovers leaning over others, champagne poured and clinked. Jill steps in. The inner circle, ringed around their drummer-queen like a band of wagons, flicking eyes and minds up and down over Jill in assessment. Jill smiles back; she knows how she looks in crescent-moon earrings and a peacock shawl silken over her shoulders.

The queen catches her eye, a continuance of their unspoken exchange: Fuck around and you might find out.

But then––

Lights off.

Ayyyyyyyyy!

A glow at the door. It’s Trombone Ray with the cake (where did he get it from?).

Haaa-ppy birthday. Clap. Haaa-ppy birthday. Clap. Haaa-ppy birthday to ya.

Glasses toasting.

Speech! Speech!

Inside jokes.

Etc.

It goes on and on, and Jill is pressed up against the wall by the density of the room, a producer from Tucson telling her that gumbo they have back there at Dizzy’s, that’s not real gumbo – didn’t even need to try it to know, just needed to see that lady with the pearls leave it behind, because – pshh – if that were real gumbo? – even she would’ve finished it. Then a thick-cologned Parisian propping his arm against her side too soon – except…for his tip that you can tie a lavender tea bag against the hot water facet in a shower? she’d allow it. It was a good tip.

But as more pack in, she’s ready to breathe again, and so she slips through the narrow gaps between elbows and out the door.

A breath. A hesitation: …should she…? A glance at the hands of her wristwatch. It’s late.

She confronts the empty hallway.

How did she get here again?

One direction as good as any. That way.

Then a presence behind her. She senses it before the footsteps.

“Wait!”

She doesn’t need to turn. She doesn’t even need to have remembered the woman’s accent to know.

—

Hester Street, where the string lights of Little Italy meet the hanging globes of Chinatown: a confrontation. Chinatown presses forward, like a psychic beast adorned by paper lamps and calligraphy. The Opening has only intensified its advance.

On the south side of the street, Vincent’s remains unconquered yet engulfed. The dimming flicker of its neon red logotype hints that it may not last for long.

“What do you think all these barricades are for? All over the street,” Jill asks.

POP! an answer, as red confetti streams down around them. The festive mood follows in waves, with a hint of desperation, Jill notes.

“New year celebration, darling.”

Jill furrows. “But the new year isn’t until January.”

“Not when it’s the apocalypse.”

Drummer girl’s hand drifts across the back of Jill’s neck to say: this way.

Vincent’s is empty except for a midwestern couple with silent cannolis in the corner.

“Maya!” greets the owner. (So that’s her name.) They interlace fingers across the bar.

“Good evening, my love.”

“The usual?”

“Make it two.” She turns to Jill, head inclined, as if to let her in on something especially lascivious. Despite the clicks of her accent, her words ooze out like strawberry jam: “They make them with their famous marinara sauce.”

Two Bloody Marys are sipped and tension swells in the space between, until the obvious question.

Jill: “Shouldn’t you be with your friends?”

Maya leans forward. “Those aren’t my friends.”

“No? Then what are––”

“They’re part of my costume.”

“Impressive costume.”

“In what way?”

“Not everyone has a costume that plays at Lincoln Center.”

“Yes, well they might if they learned the secret of costumes.”

“Which one?”

“That you mustn’t identify with them. The moment I learned that secret was the moment I lost all of my fear. And they who are not afraid can cut through this city like a knife through velvet.” Maya draws out Jill’s hand. “You don’t seem afraid.”

Jill notices her wristwatch before she can react. “Shoot!” Where had the time gone? “Sorry, my train.”

“I’ll walk you.” Maya slides two 20s across the counter.

“But––”

“Shh.” Out the door. “Where to?”

“Kingston – upstate.” says Jill. “I like the green.”

“You don’t say. I’m was headed there tomorrow––”

“Oh.”

“––for an event. Might as well take the train with you.”

“Oh! Where will you stay?”

“Under your blanket, darling.”

—

Maya, facing her in the booth of the train, arms draped over Jill’s shoulders.

Jill, biting her lip. “I don’t know how to do this.”

“As women?”

“More as strangers. But yes.”

Maya, grinning. “Hippies like us don’t need to know how to do things in order to do them.”

“How’d you know I was a hippie?” asks Jill.

“That tantric gaze of yours, hon.” Maya, drawing over to Jill’s side without cutting the threads between their eyes. “And the way you watch how people move.”

“I do watch the way people move. I do do that,” Jill, shifting to face Maya, putting distance between their bodies. “It makes me curious about the way you and I move.”

“Together, you mean.”

“Yes…we’re moving the way men and women move together. You can see that, right? You’re playing the man, I’m playing the woman. We’re taking roles and moves from a thousand years of heterosexual relating. How would you and I relate fem-to-fem instead of masc-to-fem? No one gave us the moves, or…the scripts.”

Maya raises an eyebrow. “I’m not playing the man.”

“No?”

“No. I’m playing a queen regent in exile. It borrows a masculine element but maintains the feminine mystique.”

Jill blinks. “That’s…uh, weirdly specific.”

“Anyway, I see what you mean,” say Maya with a smile. “How’s this?”

Something happens then to Maya’s appearance, something that Jill would have struggled to describe. It’s like a timelapse video of a tree growing, but playing out over Maya’s skin as musculature shifts underneath it. Suddenly her body seems to be composed less of force and lines and more of grace and curves.

Jill resists the impulse to shift in the opposite direction. “Yeah. Like that. How did you do that?”

“They call me Maya.”

Jill understands. “Sanskrit, for illusion.”

“That’s only one translation, love.”

“What are the others?”

“Transience. Creative energy of the cosmos. Or, in one interpretation,” spreading her hands, a showman, “magic show. Would you like to learn?”

She would.

—

Hopping a metal fence. Approaching through the trees. Then the cavemouth gapes, blackly. It breathes out cool air.

“Don’t be scared.” Maya smiles in her long jacket. ”Follow me and the orcs won’t touch you.”

Maya’s palm, smooth and thick with muscle.

Into the dark. Flashlights on.

Pillars loom like the legs of a great stone spider. Stalactites reach toward them…or are those stalag-mights? In the far distance: a swish and a flap.

Bats?

Maya smirks. Yes. Bats.

Abandoned structures. Fat slabs of rock.

“It was once a quarry.”

“And now?”

A flash of teeth. “A lair.“

Had her teeth always been that sharp?

Maya squeezes her hand. I’ve got you, darling.

Deeper. 30 degrees tumble down, turning breath into vapor. Down, through the cool and shallow pools. Something brushes a leg. Jill aims her headlamp down: pale fish with blind eyes, swimming amidst their feet. Deeper, past the broken-down mine-cars rusting in mud. Graffiti: KEEP OUT.

“Follow, follow. Look,” pointing, “We grow mushrooms here.”

A subtle tremor travels through Maya’s palm into Jill’s. Jill blocks it at her elbow before it can quiver up her bicep.

Maya turns, coy in Jill’s light. She’s grown an Adam’s apple. “Not in my eyes please.”

Who are you?

“I’m a game of pretend. A work of theatre. Creative mimesis.” Maya’s accent is gone and her voice has deepened, but still Maya purrs. “I’m deity yoga. A fiction-writer. A shapeshifter. I’m liquid potential.” Her voice now booms. “But my people call me the Marquis.”

And, without warning, an opening into someplace new: Their lights vignette the chamber, but it stretches wide, wide, far further than light can shine. There are shadows out there, coming closer.

“Darkness makes our magic stronger.” The shadows are dozens. They are Maya’s people. “Won’t you join us in a reverie?”

She would.

Despite Maya’s attempts, Jill is not under a spell. Her practice is to imbibe and dissolve such things. And yet she must know.

And so she would.

—

In the Mythos, they discover who they are. Or rather who they could be – the Shapeshifter Society of the Liminal Order of the Wild Heathens would never tell you who you are. That is for technists and essentialists to do.

They change.

Jill becomes the Marquis. Her teeth grow sharp, vampiric, and her gaze turns terrible. The shifters in attendance flee from her eyes.

Maya becomes a Poet of the court, verse tumbling out. The status of the Marquis, the Poet’s patron, is much enriched

The Bard is not pleased; he has been upstaged. The Priestess, ear perked, suspects dark magic at work. The Bard and Priestess join forces only to fall in love. Drama and romance ensue at length.

Jill and Maya have played through masc-to-fem, woman-to-woman, lead-to-follow and now they play through many more costumes alongside their fellow shifters. They start with Artist-Patron, then travel through Doctor-Patient, Parent-Child, Priestess-Parishioner. It goes on for hours as they all trade roles, modes of being adorned and then discarded like smocks. This is the divine game, they intimate, to become all things and none of them at once.

—

The cave has another end. And now they are out amidst the trees, giggling madly in the wind. Maya is a woman once again.

“Now wasn’t that a blast?” she asks. Her accent has shifted.

Jill turns.

It’s more than Maya’s accent. Maya now wears pigtails…and a new personality.

“What should I call you?”

”Whatever you want, sweetheart.” She’s gone southern belle.

“You know I have another name too,” says Jill, crouching down to smell a wildflower. “They call me Daki on Twitter.”

“Is that so? Didn’t take ya for a tweeter.”

“I’m full of surprises.”

“Daki…that’s short for dakini I’d bet.”

“Yes, actually.”

Maya leans against an oak. “I just knew you were some sorta mystical creature.”

“Let me be more specific.” Jill scoos up dirt and lets it fall through her fingers. Then she looks up. “You’ve made clear that ‘Marquis’ is just a role. Is ‘Maya’ one too?”

“Why, naturally. Just another mask of my own creation.”

Jill, pausing. “Then who are you?”

“The mask-maker.”

Jill twirls a bright fallen leaf through her fingers, taking this in. Then she scans Maya for…something. A there there.

“If you’re searchin' for a handhold in me, darlin’, I’ve got nothin’ to offer.” She senses Jill’s disappointment. ”This is just the way the cookie crumbles with me.”

“No,” kindly.

“Come again?”

“What about…this?” Jill points with her leaf and her mind. At…what? A yearning.

Maya puts her hand over Jill’s, gently pressing the leaf to point somewhere else. “That’s just my little wound, sugar pie.”

Jill gazes, clear-eyed. “Not a wound.”

“Oh? Do tell.”

Jill breathes in, looking around as if the answer to Maya’s question could be found amidst the trees. She hears the trickle of a stream.

As she breathes out, Jill watches the course of the forest from her mind’s eye: Streams will wind their way through trees, expand, and become rivers. Trees along the river-edges will fall, not all, but some. And then, as the sun spins across the sky, the hollowed-out trunks will cradle their own seedlings inside of their own decay. Other seeds will surge outward on the rivers’ rolling bends only to be buried beneath the sediment of their beds. Floodplains will press outward, and the water will rush over them, wiping away much the old just as it will expose buried seeds to light and air. The old will spring to life again. This forest will remake itself anew – dying into itself – each stilled moment a new mask. And yet it will carry with it the imprint of the past as a presence across forms.

Meeting her eyes, Jill is unsure whether the same can be said of Maya’s transmutations. Behind Maya’s gaze is a sense of severed history, as if the balls of her blue eyes have been cut from their roots – the muscles and the nerves which stitch them to the body. To change without taking your past with you is to flee, Jill decides. The being before Jill stands in place and yet she flees.

And still something remains. A presence across masks.

Jill, pursuing: “What about…integrity? Does integrity have a place in all of this?”

“Now there you go soundin’ like a gosh-darn essentialist.” She takes Jill’s hand again. “What makes you so calm anyway?”

“The same as you.”

“And what’s that now?”

“I stopped identifying with the costume.”

Maya glances her over. “And now you identify with somethin’ else. What might that be?”

Jill shrugs. “If I knew, I would have tweeted it already.”

Maya’s palm is now soft and pleading. “Come on now, let me buy you a cup-cake near the waterfront.”

Jill withdraws her hand, remembering how swiftly it had shot out to catch a drumstick last night. With certainty now, she knows that Maya had willed her hand into the air.

She breathes in. Then she breathes out, giving her hand back to Maya’s, in a floating-down that is beyond instinct or guile.

“How do you sound without an accent?” she asks.

Maya closes her eyes. “I don’t remember anymore.”

They stand silently, listening to the trickle of the stream. Then Jill pulls her close and bites her lip with just enough force to draw a bit of blood.

“Ow! What the hell!”

“There you are.”

Maya freezes. Then she gives a carnal smirk. “You caught me,” she says, slowly tugging Jill back.

“I’m learning,” says Jill.

“Truly you are full of surprises.” Maya brings her face close.

Their clothes stay on, despite the summer sweat. Their tongues keep to themselves. The only thing that mingles is the breath between their lips. They stay that way, bodies pressed softly against one another, lips untouching for an untrackable amount of time. A moment without costume or culmination. Birdcalls fill the silence.

Then, as the sun becomes a yolk between the leaves, they walk hand-in-hand toward the town.

Jill, bringing them to a skip: “If I let you buy me a cup-cake, what would we do then…Marquis?”

A grin and a squeezing of hands. “Many things. We would play. The changeling would teach the dakini, and the dakini would teach the changeling.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I would teach you to shed the dreadful weight of consistency. We’d meet every new moon or so. You’d leave your back door unlocked and I’d climb into your bed at dusk, giving us a few hours before we’d catch midnight trains to random destinations. Each time a different city by day – different hotels, different cafes, different places to make mistakes: we’d meet clerks and bartenders and lovers with new accents, dancing through selves, growing and shedding them as autumn leaves. We’d explore the multiverse of subjectivities.

“And by night?” Jill asks, hopping them over a fallen tree.

“In the evenings, before you return home, as we are drunk and stumbling in the streets, or draped over one another on public benches, and so forth, you would teach me what lies behind maya – the stillness from which the magic show sparkles. It’s a stillness, yes? You see, I’m not as thick as you think. You would teach me about the thread which unites all costumes, the essence behind the appearance – or whatever. We'd write letters to selves we've forgotten and recall the greater story in which each is but a character.”

The changeling leaps up the neck of a sycamore, jacket draping from their crouch over a low bough: “We’d build a bridge between my motion and your stillness. I’d become you, and you’d become me, and meanwhile, mysteriously, we’d stay ourselves. And then slowly, over time, as both strangers and friends, we’d fall in love. And then again.”

Jill admires the eyes of the being crouching above her, this person who exists halfway between the earthly world and the imaginal. Their eyes had grown bright.

“Is that all?” Jill asks.

“Obviously not. We would do all of that and much more.” The changeling lifts Jill’s hand to their lips and kisses the knuckles. “You barely know me, and not just because it’s barely been a day. I am not someone who is easy to know. I understand that. And so it’s an offer you’d need to accept on faith alone. What do you think?”

Jill takes it in. Then: “Come down from there,” she says.

The changeling hops down and stands close. “Would you like all of that, Daki dear, all that which I described?”

Daki brushes a strand of hair behind the changeling’s ear. She presses her cheek to theirs and considers the forest over their shoulder. Then, with one hand she reaches back to cover their eyes. With the other, she blinds her own. Her meaning is clear: I would.