He huffed out his breath in a blast of disbelief. “Damn me. You did do it.

You really did!” He took a breath as if to restore him steadiness. “Was it so bad? You ask that as if you think I know the full answer. All I can tell you is that this magic gets into you, like ivy putting roots into a tree trunk.

And it climbs up you and it steals your light and sucks out your sustenance. It uses you, Never. And every time you use it, you give more of yourself to it. Do you understand me? Tell me that you know what I’m talking about.”

“I don’t! That is, I do and I don’t. How do you know so much about it, anyway?”

“I told you. There was a woman, a Speck woman. She wanted me, and what a Speck woman wants, she takes. And a Speck woman is just like their magic. She makes you her own, and that’s it.” He stood up so suddenly his chair nearly fell over. With lightninglike reflexes, he caught it and then stepped clear of it. He walked a turn around my small house, staring at the walls as if he could see through them. “Never met a woman like her before. Once you start going among them, you’ll see what I mean.

They got a whole different way of seeing the world, a whole different idea of how life works. And once they take you in, suddenly it seems that it’s the only way to see things. They just accept the magic. They don’t go around thinking that they’re going to decide how their lives go. They laugh at us for that. Once, that woman showed me a little plant growing by a stream.

She said, ‘You see that little plant, all by itself, having its own life?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I see it.’ And she said, ‘That’s you. And you see that other little plant over there, on the other side of the stream? You see it, all by itself over there? That’s me.’

“So I thought she was trying to tell me something, about how the stream separated us, about how different we were. But then she went over and grabbed the plant that was me and she pulled it up out of the ground. But its tough little roots came with it. And she started following that root, lifting it up out of the ground, and that root went from my plant to another to another and to another and finally it went right under the stream and come up on the other side and she pulled it up and it went to the plant she said was her. And she stood there, holding up all this network of roots, and she said, ‘See. There isn’t one little plant growing alone. It’s all of us.’”

He fell silent, palm up and empty, reached out toward me, waiting for a response. He seemed terribly moved by what he had told me. “It’s a nice story,” I said at last. “But I don’t see how it helps me understand whatever it is you’re trying to say.”