The witch is an artist of the most radical kind. She overturns the usual configuration of fairy tales, where it’s the Prince who appears in the nick of time to break the spell. With her laying on of hands, her unobtrusive needle pricks (“That which has no substance enters where there is no space”), and her captivating company—nearly as captivating as Q.’s—she’s making an upside-down story, undoing his spell with one of her own.
She offers me spells to work at home, too. I light up the moxa stick and the apartment smells like a marijuana den. I rub the aromatic oils into my skin, conjuring forests and fields: pine, eucalyptus, rosemary, fennel, caraway, lavender. .. . I practice deep breathing. The air disperses inside to become tingling energy—the Tai Chi teacher’s beloved elixir, the flutist’s preserved breath that will outlast him and even his music—and then spirit, an amber glow like inner sunlight. I watch my arms float in baths filled with salts from the Dead Sea; I could almost levitate in the water. I can’t swear any of this will cure me, but I follow her instructions on faith, the way you have to do in a story.
And yet, and yet, she hurts. In her effort to make me well (I do feel some energy returning, it’s unmistakable), her potions and treatments make me sick. She sets me painful trials, like sewing shirts out of nettles. The skin rash alone would have been sufficient. The skin rash and fever would have been sufficient. The skin rash and fever and sore throat. . . But like God raining down plagues on the Egyptians, she’s unleashed the whole arsenal.
One afternoon as I lay on her mat in the cool, quiet room, she began her performance by pricking my ear with needles.
“Hey, wait a minute! That one really hurt.”
“Sorry,” she said. “That was for the kidneys, where your energy is weak today. That’s why you felt it.”
“The kidneys? So why make my ear suffer?”
“The meridians of the body pass through the ear, so by inserting needles in the proper ear points you can influence different organs.”
I gave her my skeptical look. She knew it well. She merely smiled the virtuous California smile and carried on.
“The ear is shaped like a fetus. Have you ever noticed?” she said. “Picture the fetus lying upside down in the ear. The acupuncture points correspond to where the various organs would be located in that position.”
The ear is shaped like a fetus? “It is, isn’t it? Those photos of fetuses always reminded me of something. Or maybe it was the ear that reminded me.”
“Chinese medicine has used acupuncture points in the ear for centuries, but the analogy to the fetus was just noted and tested in the 1950s. It was a French doctor, Paul Nogier. It’s not witchcraft, I assure you. You can read about it in respectable books. That’s what I was studying in Paris when I met my former husband. A whole new set of ear points was developed as a result. What’s uncanny is that many of them correspond to the old Chinese points.”
“What a nice image. The fetus lying upside down in the ear.”
“It’s more than an image. You can treat incipient cataracts through the ear, and cardiovascular disease, and lots of other things. Okay, I’ll do the other. Is it still hurting?”
“Not as much. Ow! The kidneys again?”