Thou Shalt Suffer a Witch to Live

There’s a very good reason I love stories. Stories, of the good old fashioned variety, are logical. They can be divided into plots, themes, and characters. They have beginnings, middles, and ends. The intricate dance of these elements begins a process of cohesion that takes individual words and binds them together. If you know the essence of stories in general, you can understand any other story. My life, sadly, is not a story.

I think of my life as a poorly written sitcom. People appear and vanish with no explanation, act on unexplained motives for no reason than to complicate the plot, and along the way make the whole world a chaotic mess that other people, removed from the uncomfortable reality of it, can laugh at. Above all, there’s no way to extract any kind of theme or moral from all of it unless you take some sort of ultimate deconstructionist zen view point.

For every year of my life that has passed, I feel like there has been a group of hack writers sitting around a table, playing catch as they spewed out ridiculous ideas to try and boost the ratings of my life.

Head writer: “I’ve got it! His parents have been married before and never told him!”

New writer, who hasn’t forgotten the rules of story: “He’s thirteen now… isn’t that going to be a tough sell?”

Cynical writer: “Nah, viewers love that kind of shit.”

The stupid writer, who thinks he’s creative: “Hahaha! I’ve got it! What if his dad used to be married to one of his mom’s cousins!”

Head writer: “Fucking brilliant!”

Cynical writer: “Yeah! Those idiots will drink that shit up.”

Head writer: “No, let’s save that one for season sixteen. You’re getting a raise Neville!”

New writer: “But… I mean we didn’t foreshadow that at all. We’ve established a reality already, and we can’t go back and write all over it just because we think we can get a cheap laugh out of it. I’m all for comedy, but jokes have to serve the plot.”

Head writer: I hear what you’re saying. Neville, we need to add a zany neighbor kid in the mid-season lull. Let’s get going gentlemen! Good call new guy!”

If what follows has never been foreshadowed, mentioned, or conceived as being remotely possible and if it brings absolutely nothing new to my life other than another “well that was strange” moment, I am sorry. It’s what happened. I wish it hadn’t.

*****

“I’m so sick of people trying to pretend that bad photography is evidence of paranormal activity. And I’m sick of people pretending they can talk to dead people.” I was fourteen years old, in the passenger seat of my grandfather’s car, with my brother Bryan sitting in the back, and we had just seen “The Sixth Sense.” Ever since the movie had ended, my grandfather had gone into a kind of furious withdrawal, and I was hoping my rant would get him back in good spirits. While my grandfather had never once laughed at a single one of my jokes, he sometimes exhaled in a way that I had taken as a sign of amusement. The effect of my rant was opposite of what I had intended. He clenched his hands on the steering wheel, huffed in agitation, and gave me a sidelong glance of irritation. He raked his beard like he wanted to tear it out.

I tried again. As everyone in the car was an atheist, I assumed I had only pursued an incorrect argument. “Psychics don’t do anything but speak in vague generalities that could apply to anyone, and then they look at you like you should see them as the source of all world knowledge.” My grandfather gripped the steering wheel like he was trying to strangle the car. I had seen him stare down a group of teenage thugs and not bat an eyelash. It was the most intense emotional response I had ever seen from him. “Umm… don’t you agree, Grandpa?”

“Please be quiet, BC.” He said it the way a Master Chief says “knock it off” to an insubordinate soldier before shooting him in the chest for treason. I gulped.

My brother Bryan, wearing a corrective eye-patch with a truck on it, asked, “Grandpa… you don’t believe in magic do you?”

“Be quiet! Both of you!” My brother and I shut up, immediately, as my grandpa twitched the twitches of a man with grave secrets that need to be aired.

“Grandpa…. are you okay?” I asked, braced for an explosion.

“I don’t see why you’re so mad just because we don’t believe in psychics….” said Bryan.

My grandfather tilted his head back and exploded with the fury of ages. “MY MOTHER WAS PSYCHIC!” My grandfather was a seventy year old veteran, who didn’t believe in anything he hadn’t seen himself. It was out of nowhere, out of character, and out of this world. Literally.

My brother and I blinked. “What?” we asked. We had the confusion of newborns who had no context in which to place the facts before them.

“She could speak languages she’d never heard before, talk to the dead, read minds that sort of stuff.” My grandfather turned all his focus to watching traffic. Before this moment, my grandfather hadn’t even believed in hypnotism.

“Wait… did you just tell me my great-grandmother was a witch?” I asked.

“No!” It was the sort of indignant negative that said “Yes, you’re great-grandmother was the biggest witch who ever lived.” This response began a long series of speculations that have not ended to this day.

“Wow.” My brother and I said separately. “Wow.” No one said anything for the rest of the car ride home.

When we pulled back up in front of our house, my grandfather looked at my brother and I separately. “Now, let’s never talk about this again.” He didn’t need to add “or else.” It was implied.

Then it was never mentioned again, except vaguely in passing, for the rest of my entire life. I still have not pieced together all of the facts on my great grandmother, but something witchy was definitely going on.