A few months passed, as summer turned into autumn and then a few more as autumn turned into the winter that always comes far too soon in this city. Sam woke up next to his new girlfriend ... temporary partner? ... significant other? It was hard to know exactly what to call her at that point without her objecting, but when one is regularly waking up naked with somebody and spending a lot of time with her and her kids, with some show of affection being involved, one needs some sort of word for such an arrangement, and Dawn wasn't clearing up his confusion on this point. Friendling? No, let's just call her a girlfriend, and be done with it.
At any rate, they were naked, and they were awake.
Sam was very glad to admit that he always looked forward to seeing her, even if she could occasionally drive him insane. He had met Dawn during a camping trip with Lisa, one of the organizers, and some of her friends, shortly before the strangeness with Kitty. Lisa, playing matchmaker, had asked Dawn to carpool with Sam. While Sam quickly learned to avoid the subject of politics with Dawn, who was as PC as the rest, almost any other topic was a pleasure to discuss with her, one of the few other graduate students in the group. And these were, after all, the hysterical 90s, and bizarre political positions were not hard to find, anyway, even among non-pagans, and this particular feminist had that rarest of all things in that day and age : a sense of humor.
They showered, and then, in a very non-feminist way, Dawn made him breakfast."Are you going to the Samhain celebration?", Dawn asked over potatos and bacon. Sam, looking quizically at a piece of the crumbly reddish black meat, was unsure. "I'm not sure that I want to. I haven't exactly been enjoying the last few Pagan events, and I'd kind of like to avoid the coffeehouse crowd". "How do you even know if they'll be there", Dawn asked, as Sam worked up his nerve and took a bite. "It wouldn't be the first time?", Sam asked. "Sweetness ... my angel ...", he started to say (she liked that), " ... these people seemed kind of psychotic, and they don't seem to be getting any nicer." "How do you know somebody hasn't already talked to them? Ron and Lisa are your friends, Sam, and they are setting this thing up. But if you don't want to go, you don't have to go." "Did somebody talk with them?", Sam asked. Silence. "OK", he thought, "this is where I'm supposed to read between the lines". "I guess you're right", he said, deciding to go.
Of course, they were there for the party, and nobody had talked to them about a thing. Sam sighed. "Some things never change", he thought, remembering how he had been surprised in much the same way, after being persuaded to go to something else, just a few months back.
Late afternoon, not quite dusk. The clouds, tinted with red, grow and merge into a darkening overcast that the sunset vainly tries to poke through, leaving patches of pink amidst the grey. The waves loudly crash against the shore, and you feel the spray against your face as the wind carries it in. "At least there's no salt in it", you think.
Strictly speaking, this is the beginning of autumn, or the end of summer, but you're hard pressed to believe it. Even in their coats and gloves, people are shivering. An almost imperceptable fog has begun to gather, the damp reaching through their clothes and yours. Somebody calls out to you, her voice almost lost in the roar of the lake, "the circle is forming". You walk back to join them.Had it been only three months since that spiral dance? Hard to believe, Sam thought. It seemed so much longer than that. And, looking around, he realized that it was about to seem much longer. Shivering against the cold, he asked himself "why are we here". "Because we have all four elements present", said Lisa, answering that same question as somebody else asked it, right as the wind picked up some more. "The Lake gives us water, we stand upon the earth, the air is above us, and we gather by a fire." "Thank God for that last one", though Sam, briefly, until he remembered just how small a fire it would have to be, if the Park District wasn't to take an interest in the proceedings.
Why these things mattered to these Wiccans, he was still unsure about. In trying to learn more about their beliefs, and their culture, he had been unable to find any evidence that they even had a culture or any real beliefs. Mostly, they seemed to just be going through the motions, as if they had read all of their actions out of a cookbook, and found their opinions in the same place. No stories to tell, no thoughts to share, not even any recipes to call their own ... was there even any reason to be here? Aside from the fact that he did kind of miss Ron and Lisa, and was glad to see them?
But, here he was and ... oh, look! ... there was Lucy, and all of her friends, and they were glaring in his direction. Yes, he thought, this had been a good idea. But, there he was, and he decided that he might as well make the most of the situation.
The circle gathered, and Sam found his place in it. He wanted to get as far from Lucy as he could possibly be in that circle ... but, wait. That would leave him looking directly at her, which would give her an opportunity to be paranoid, even if he did avert his gaze. Bad idea. OK, he thought, how about if I move 10 degrees to my right ... and there! Now he couldn't even begin to look like he was looking at her. "One less nutcase to worry about", he thought. "I'll get through this evening, yet." What he didn't notice was a short, stocky young girl coming up behind him, and dropping into place as Sam took his position. One of Lucy's friends, who Sam hadn't met before, had found her target.
Naively, Sam had thought that getting out of Lucy's line of sight, while keeping a good distance from her, would be enough to put her mind at ease. Not a chance. At that very moment, Lucy leaned over to one of her neighbors, and told her that she could feel Sam's "presence" across the circle. "Yes, I can sense it", she said. "He's launching a psychic attack!". Sam, when he was told about this later on, could do no more than sadly shake his head. "If I had been even remotely psychic, would I have ever come anywhere near that coffeehouse?", he would ask.
Lisa called for quiet, and the whispers slowly ceased. All stood in a circle around that small barbecue grill out of which the flames leaped, most holding their arms tightly closed, or their hands in their pockets, though some said they could feel its warmth from 50 feet away. "Now, everybody take the hands of their neighbors ...", a faint groan went up, " ... and this will soon all be over". An imaginary circle was cast, and those who had been chosen called on the guardians of the watchtowers of the various directions (whoever they were) and invited them to come. As Sam looked toward the person speaking, Lucy's friend did the most peculiar thing.
As they joined hands, she pulled hers and his in to her side, and up into - well, a truly beautiful location that Sam didn't know her well enough to visit. Sam turned beet red, and pulled back. With considerable force, leaning away from her - she was surprisingly strong and Sam wanted his hand out of there, as quickly as possible and as visibly as possible. The last thing he wanted people to think, especially at that point, was that this was his doing. "Is she even paying attention to what she's doing? Good Lord, she just got me to first base! Maybe she's too cold to be thinking straight?", he wondered, not yet knowing of her connection with Lucy. "Did you see what that (illegimate offspring) just did to Lucy's friend?", somebody whispered. "Did you see who was pulling away from whom?", one of us replied. But, of course, it wouldn't have been "sensitive" to notice that, and so almost nobody did.
One of Lucy's objectives had just been met. Her friend, in doing as Lucy had asked, suceeeded in getting Sam branded a sex fiend by some more of those in attendance, lending credence to her claim that she had been psychically attacked as part of a stalking of her by somebody who had never bothered to call her, not even once. "Goes to show you what kind of person he is", revelling in the attention she was getting, as she found her paranoia being validated. An angry and bewildered Sam would find himself being mass pressured into learning "shielding" by those around him later that night, in order to protect Lucy from her own psychoses, it would seem. But, for now, he didn't know what was going on, and was charitable enough not to assume the worst. Or, to put it another way, he wasn't about to let himself be sucked into the mass paranoia around him.
The ritual ended. Sam started talking to the woman he had been next to, and she seemed like pleasant company. "Are you going over to Melville's?", she asked. "Sure, why not?", he said. She waved goodbye to him, apologizing for not being able to offer him a lift, saying that there just was no room. "No problem", said Sam, who, being on foot himself, got there 15 minutes after everybody else. As he entered, working his way through the crowd, and looked for a menu, he went to sit down. Oh! There was the girl from the event. He went over to say hello, and as he approached, and somebody moved out of the way - he saw Lucy sitting next to her. "Hello, stalker boy", she cried, a sickly smile crossing her face.
Sam was less than amused. "Why are you calling me that", he asked. "Because the blond woman is calling you that", refusing to specify which blond woman she meant, out of this largely Teutonic crowd. "Why can't you just treat it as a joke". Um - because an accusation like that, can make the life of someone wrongly accused, extremely difficult, Lucy? She then went on to tell Sam, "I didn't reject you because you were a Gemini" (No, he was thinking, "you did so because I never called you"), "I did so because you're so weird" - doing this strange look, where her eyes would cross and bug out ever so slightly, at the same time. "And to think that I passed up a prize like her", thought Sam. In his own defense, he started to mention that he had never asked Lucy for her number, that she had just handed it to him, and ... before he could mention that he had never seen fit to call, which would pretty much answer any charge of "stalking", her friend cut him off. The usual line about how "could you BOTH cut it out?" - plenty offensive, when addressed to somebody who had done nothing that he should have had to cut out.
Doubly offensive, even infuriating, when the one being denied his right to speak freely, has been denied his right to defend himself (and his reputation) from slander. Sam, deciding that he had had enough of the girl's company, went over to talk to "Bloodaxe" for a while. At that point, the "terrified" Lucy, apparently overcoming her fear of psychic attack, decided to come over. She interrupted Sam, jumped in the conversation, discussing bondage and how she'd like Bloodaxe to tie her up. The message was as clear as it was outrageous - "I can have you silenced, Jewboy, but you can't have me silenced. You can't even walk away or talk, until I'm done talking." It was a statement of sexual power and of racial privilege, and it left Sam consumed with rage, Sam, who was now several months into being harassed and months away from seeing any resolution.
She flirted with Bloodaxe for a while while John Bohac, her boyfriend (this being now publicly acknowledged, after he had denied it for some time) sat in a corner, alone. After she left, Sam mentioned that she was in a good flaming on some of the Pagan forums. "What will that accomplish?" he asked. "What does it need to accomplish?", Sam responded. "It'll make me feel good." The blood had drained from Sam's face, as he suddenly rose to go and headed for the door.
Before he got there, he ran into Lisa, who he had trouble charging past. Maybe she thought he needed a pleasant experience for once. We don't know. But, for whatever reason, she invited him on a camping trip that evening, the very one that he would be meeting Dawn on, in about a week. "And you say it's how far from Chicago? 80 miles? Far enough for a noticable change in accent, you say?" Looking at Lucy, who was now loudly explaining the relative merits of vibrators as opposed to penises to some non-pagan who hadn't gotten away in time, he thought about it, as he started to turn to head for the bar. This was slowing the quick getaway Sam was in a mood for, but as we said, grad students, are good at deferring gratification as a group, and he wasn't just tired of the coffeehouse crowd. Sam was tired of Chicago, period, and getting far, far away from it was an appealing notion. "Sounds good", he told Lisa. "Can I get back to you on that one in a minute? My throat's a little dry, I need to get something to drink." And up he headed for his glass of seltzer water with lime.
This trip would prove to be a healing experience for him, twice, actually. To be out of the city, in deep green woods like the ones that had once encircled and covered Sam's home town, before developers "improved it". To hear the water gently trickling past instead of horns blaring. To simply hear the birds singing as the sun rose through a mist that would never rise off of land buried in concrete ... " "Hey, (deleted)", somebody said as he passed, snapping Sam out of his reverie, as Sam waited for service. "What are you doing launching psychic attacks at people?". Sam got his drink, and walked back to the table. "Sign me up", he told Lisa.