I was over at Stone’s one afternoon, watering her plants, lingering in her absence, when I looked over at her wall of bookshelves. Somehow, we’d never seemed to find an afternoon to read together, as I’d imagined it. My reading habits had devolved on the other coast, and I wanted to start again, and get subsumed in a story that was not about who killed the lady on the tenth floor of the Santorini hotel. I browsed through heavily footnoted tomes on exchange economies and sprawling nineteenth-century realist novels. Many books of poetry. I felt bored and twitchy from the seriousness of her collection.

There, in the bottom right corner, one of the books was emitting a purple prism into the air.

I knelt down on the rug and waved my hand near the shape. I leaned forward and took the book in my hands. A title appeared on a translucent pearly-silver cover.

The Modern History of the Rhiz, written in curling letters.

I wondered if I’d accidentally macro-dosed, but I’d had my last micro-dose two days ago. I took the book to the couch and opened it. I ran my hands over the slightly raised printed text: “All matters that precede the modern history of the Rhiz are closed to the pre-summons novice. The modern history of the Rhiz is an unstable document, constantly shifting according to unfolding research. We acknowledge that most queer histories exist outside of normative record-keeping.”

The modern history of the Rhiz began in San Francisco during the signing of the United Nations charter. As statesmen were discussing peace against a backdrop of recent war horrors, their fifty-one wives were dining in the back room of The Arched Umbrella, passing sweet and heavy foods across the table. Their looks were also sweet and heavy: It is a well-known fact that the wives of political figures are often lesbians. Never before had so many come together in one place. Afterward, over brandy at The Lovely Goose, cards were passed, a few ending up in the hands of straight women who did not understand the innuendos about fish and clams and lilies opening.

Meanwhile, in the corridors of the San Francisco Opera, the secretaries and valets of all these “great” men waited with capes and cloaks and extra ink and flasks. At least twenty-five of these attendants were what was then called homosexual. By the third night of the General Assembly, the merry lesbian wives and the homosexual butlers began organizing with one another. They wanted to create a foil of the UN that could link them across the ever-shifting nation-state borders. One of the secretaries, Venceslas, had grown up moving across Mexico, with a father who believed it was his personal mission to reinstill Catholic fervor in indigenous territories. V, as he called himself, spent his childhood in the state of Oaxaca, which had seduced his father because of the prominence of witchcraft. Early on in their stay, V befriended a young girl, Manuela, who brought their family modest meals in the evening. Manuela told him about the mushrooms that her grandmother ate during ceremonies, and how they transported her to other places with ancient designs and otherworldly patterns. Her grandmother despised V’s father for reviving Catholic fervor, but she let him come over to play. While resting from her work in the fields, she talked and talked and talked in Mazatec, and V had no idea what she was saying, but the look on her face was one of bliss. In all of his father’s sermons about the Body and the Blood and the Transmutation, in the rapture of incense, in the supposed balm of redemption, V had never encountered the ease that flowed from Manuela’s abuelita. He begged Manuela to translate.