Flying with the Death's head dominatrix

My neighbor on my first flight home is wearing black, from high boots to top hat. She has Death's heads on her black gloves. She might have stepped out of the scene in The Master and Margarita where Mephistopheles puts on a magic show in Moscow.
    I tell her, "You look like a magician."
    "Retired magician," says her male companion.
    "So what does a retired magician do?" I ask a bit later.
    She considers this for a moment before she replies, "Let me say that spankings are my friends."
    I am not immediately inclined to pursue this conversation. I note the title of the book I have brought for in-flight reading. It is Peter Kingsley's A Story Waiting to Pierce You. Life rhymes. I smile at the thought of how Peter might twitch at the thought that his book about ancient shamans could be misidentified as an S&M romp.
    My neighbor cranes around, inspecting the rest of the economy cabin. "I have a good feeling about this flight," she announces. "Every seat is taken. When a plane is going to crash, on average twenty percent of the seats are vacant, because people sense something wrong and don't show up at the airport. There was a special on the Discovery channel about this."
    "Very interesting."
     I put my nose back in A Story Waiting to Pierce You until after take off, when she starts talking about crows and ravens. It seems she watches them very closely. She says she knows a big raven with a large harem. I point out that this would be rare indeed, since ravens generally live in couples and - like many other birds - mate for life.
    She wants to tell me about a place she knows where crows are sometimes so thick on the ground that they cover a whole field. "I've seen one crow talking while all the others are listening. I think of that one crow as the storyteller. When the crow speaker is done, sometimes all the crows take off at once. But sometimes they fall on the crow speaker and peck him to death. What do you think of that?"
    Before I come up with a response, she adds, "Native Americans say that when the other crows kill the speaker, it's because he is a bad storyteller."
    Now this is a story that pierces me. Over the previous week, at my writing retreat at Mosswood Hollow in the foothills of the Cascades, I created a "frame" story within which I could write other stories. In the frame story, inspired by another recent plane trip, the narrator is riding with Death in the darkened cabin of an airplane. Death reminds him that they have an arrangement: he must keep coming up with stories that entertain Death, or else his life will be over. Now the Death's head dominatrix is telling me about how a murder of crows deals with a storyteller who fails to entertain.
    She has story ideas for me. They come from her uninvited, after pauses in the conversation, blown on a strange wind. "I would love to read the story of Jezebel, told from her point of view," she announces. "I am fascinated by the Phoenicians." Can she possibly know that one of the stories I was writing for Death last week opens in the Phoenician city of Sidon?
    The conversation continues in gusts. She says, "Do you believe that dreams show us what happens after death?"
    "Absolutely. In dreams, we receive visitations from the dead and we travel to places where they live. I have written books about this."
    "My first husband was shot to death at breakfast time in a diner, with a cup of Americano in his hand, by a crazy guy who was looking to kill someone else. I grieved so deep I thought I would join him. Then I had a dream that was more than a dream. I sat up in bed in the middle of the night and he was there. He looked good. He wanted to tell me what he is doing where he now lives. He was a musician. He told me that now he works up music and side-effects for dreams that are being produced for people who are sleeping."
    "Great job," I say. "And I think that is absolutely possible. There are many kinds of dreams, and some feel like productions custom-made for the dreamer. I have always been curious about who is in the film crews."
    "I wasn't really a magician," she tells me before landing. "I worked for a circus as an aerialista. But I did magic, especially on that massage table I had going at the same time." She plays with a long braid that escapes the top hat and comes back to the spankings. "How do you tell a stranger you're a dominatrix?" she muses. 
     "When and how did you recognize your calling?"
     "Growing up in in the Deep South with Jehovah's Witness parents helped. Then people kind of got me typed when we played cops and robbers as kids and I always wanted to be the cop with the handcuffs."
    Hard not to feel that the whole encounter was created for me by one of those teams of dream producers. 

    
    photos (c) Robert Moss