The last time I saw her was two summers ago when she hitchhiked cross-country from Vermont to the Burning Man Festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Magdalene – little Mags, nineteen years old, with her curly brown hair, thick glasses and a heart big enough to swallow the world and then ask for more. “I know that this is something I need to do,” she told us before she left. Little Mags, her backpack towering over her head as she stood by the side of the highway. Sign in hand – “Burning Man - Nevada.”
She made it to Reno without much trouble. Mags is nothing if not engaging and finding rides wasn’t hard for her. She has a way with people. There’s something about how she talks to you that makes you just want to open up and let her crawl inside.
Her first night in Reno she slept under a tarp in a ditch near a Piggly Wiggly. “You gotta roll with the punches,” she used to tell me. It was late August and the weather was still pleasant, with mostly sunny days and cool nights. She said it was what she needed. Good weather or not, though, money was a problem. Mostly the lack of it and how that meant a lack of food as well. When I asked her if she had been scared or lonely she just smiled that warm, toothy smile of hers. “You just got to keep rolling with the punches,” she said. “I could feel that I was there for a reason.”
In the morning Mags headed into the center of the city. A tiny girl with a huge, blue hiking pack, distinctly out of place among the vacationing families wandering around the mini-malls and fast food joints that litter downtown Reno. She met Phil around lunchtime while she was sitting on a bench outside the Reno Public Library. Phil is a bald, six foot five, ex-con and recovering alcoholic with a build that a Navy SEAL would be jealous of. He walked up to her and asked if she was lost. She told him that she didn’t believe in being lost. Phil offered to buy her lunch. They hit it off immediately, spending most of the afternoon discussing their respective philosophies on life – one of those being to freely accept what the universe presents to you.
Example number one: Phil.
Example number two: After several hours, Phil excused himself to go attend his mandatory anger management class as was required by the conditions of his parole. This is where the story becomes hazy. Where truth and fiction trade places so many times you lose track, like watching the ball in a shell game. No matter how hard you try, the chances are the ball is under the shell that you didn’t pick. How she met Emery is like that. There are a multitude of truths belonging to a multitude of people. This is the one that I chose. It is as real as any other. This is, after all, a story not about truth, but about the belief in fate.
Before she left for Nevada, Mags’s mother had a dream. In her dream a handsome, tall, muscular black man dressed in African robes and displaying a throbbing erection had come to claim her daughter. She chanted in a strange tongue and opened up his arms to take Magdalene away. She only told Mags about this later, after Reno and Emery.
Phil and Emery knew each other from the halfway house where the both just happened to live after being released from prison. It just happened that Phil needed to stop in to see Emery on that particular day. Introductions where made. It just happened that there was something about Emery that drew her in. Mages decided to stay and have dinner with Emery while Phil went to his meeting.
Emery is fifty-two years old, six foot three, with short hair and dark, bottomless eyes. He spent sixteen years in jail for killing a man who had attempted to rob him outside a bar. Emery bashed his skull in with a lead pipe. He pleaded self-defense. He was convicted for manslaughter.
“When I first saw him I knew that he was my soul mate,” Mags told me over a static ridden phone line. “There was something that I can’t even put into words. We stayed up the entire night talking about our lives. It’s like everything else has been culminating to this point.”
I listened in disbelief to what Mags was saying to me over the phone. The story seemed too wild to be real, but too real to be just another tangential “Mags’ism.” She told me that she’d left Reno the next day, bound for Burning Man, but returned to the city after only a few hours because she knew that her place was by Emery’s side. I asked her when she planned on coming home and she didn’t answer. All she could say was how this was right.
Emery lived in a house in a south Reno neighborhood dominated by drug dealers and condemned buildings. He shares the house with Mark. Mark is forty-two, autistic and spends most of his time taking apart computers. They are both on government assistance. Emery claims to have a patent pending approval for a new kind of bio-fuel that will revolutionize large engine manufacturing. “As soon as Emery’s parent comes through we’re going to buy a nice place for ourselves in northern California,” Mags had told her mother. She never let anyone talk to Emery directly, but she sent a picture of the two of them together. In the photo they are standing side by side in front of a small house with faded, white siding and a metal screen door. She has her arm around his waist; her pale face nestled against the dark outline of his muscular forearm. She is smiling; her eyes squinted behind her glasses.
It was a few months later that I found out that Mags planned to have her IUD taken out on her twentieth birthday – the end of August. “There’s nothing I want more right now than to settle down and make a family,” she said.
“Where have you gone?” I asked.
Mags’s parents were frantic. Her friends, myself included, made plans to drive out to Reno to bring her back by force if necessary. But it never happened. We never did go out there and take her back. For all our big talk about saving our friend from whatever had happened or would happen to her out there in Reno, it was just that – talk. Because as much as we loved her, there comes a point where you have to let go. I could hear it in her voice the last time we spoke. It was the same old Mags. She thought she had found her place. And who were we? Did we really know what that meant? No, of course not.
Maybe this story isn’t so much about fate either. Maybe it’s about love.
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