Authors: Frank Portman
The avatar in the dream IM window was the same kitten face Daisy had used in her real-life account, though in the dream it was peeking out from what looked like a seal of Babalon.
Andromeda’s dream wrists had been tied to the arms of a dream chair, so she couldn’t type to respond. A door appeared to her left, on which shone a golden Sigillum Dei Aemath. When it opened she saw a silver flashing eight-rayed star of Ishtar on the other side, and a purple curtain beyond that, upon which an Eye of Horus in a triangle glittered yellow-gold with blue flecks. Andromeda recognized it instantly: this door appeared to be the lid of Daisy’s lost tarot box, and the curtain was the velvet Eye of Horus bag. The curtain fluttered as if in the wind, and Andromeda also recognized the view beyond it, which was the scene of Pixie Colman Smith’s painting of the Fool, though the Fool himself was not in it. She managed to slide her chair through the door and curtain and into the painting.
For a moment, all was bright and clear and peaceful. There was an echo, a fading, a trailing-off of a beautiful chord made up of thousands of perfect notes, sounding as though it had been struck just before she had entered the scene. The chord was the sound of the grass growing and of the clouds rolling by and of light flooding in to destroy darkness. Andromeda had now replaced the Fool in the center of the picture. She breathed in and a kind of vibrating elation spread from her lungs to the rest of her body. Daisy’s scent suddenly descended in a cloud, so distinct that Dream Andromeda expected Daisy to be standing in front of her when the fog lifted.
Then it all went wrong. The peace was shattered. Pixie’s cool blue sky darkened to gray, then to a deepening red. The Fool’s little white dog bounded in and attacked Andromeda, sinking its teeth into her leg. She tried to scoot her chair back toward the door and the safety of her room, but the dog was pulling her in the other direction. She teetered and finally tipped over the cliff, dog, chair, and all. She landed on top of the crying man from the Five of Cups, knocking over the two standing cups and scattering the others. The Five of Cups man was still crying and bleeding underneath her and her chair, his blood steadily seeping into the green grass and forming a dark purple, stinking marshland. Mosquitoes buzzed in her ears. Globes of bright fire formed and exploded all around her. She felt scalding drops of rain that tasted of blood. The Fool was lying dead on the grass nearby. Flies poured out of his mouth and open wounds. The dog was still gnawing her leg, which had broken off.
In the distance, the Tower was blazing. A cascade of burning books poured out its windows. And the High Priestess’s throne was empty between the two pillars labeled
B
and
J
. Andromeda had a feeling that if she could scoot her chair over between the pillars, she might have the power to tame the world and restore everything to balance; but the blood of the Five of Cups man and her own blood was a rising tide that was pulling them both down, a viscous, warm quicksand. The empty cups floated by.
Then she saw the Hierophant and the Star—who seemed to have lost one of her pitchers—along with the Hermit and the Page of Cups, stumbling blindly along the river. They couldn’t see where they were going because their heads were all on fire. The head of the little fish in the Page’s cup was also on fire. “Call the police,” the fish said in a giggly, watery, Irish-accented voice. Then an enormous hand scooped them all up and deposited them in a gigantic bag and all was dark. Finally, she heard the sound of the door-lid slamming shut. Andromeda’s hands and wrists were numb and tingling when she woke up. Daisy’s smell, along with the acrid, smoky scent of the Hierophant’s burning mitre, remained faintly in her room.
All the people in the dream had been from Pixie’s tarot drawings, with one exception: a distant figure in a black hooded Tau robe, who had been on the mountain behind the river, gesturing wildly. Daisy? That part was a mystery. Andromeda hadn’t been able to make out the gestures, but they had seemed like a kind of dance.
Upon awakening she had reached for her notebook and written down an account of the dream immediately, before even getting out of bed. She knew full well that the act of reducing the complexity of the dream experience to mere words on a page would change it irreparably, but she believed she had gotten most of the details.
“They are burning down my room,” said a distant voice she thought she could just make out behind the sound of the water rushing out of the tap into her bath that morning. This was more common: she often heard indistinct voices underneath rushing or mechanical sounds like running water or the vacuum; the chatter of elementals, she had often speculated, which was just as likely as her father’s explanation of such phenomena; that is, governmental telepathic experiments or neighbors talking behind their backs, their voices amplified by an inadvertent alignment of magnetic or atmospheric conditions. But this time it was recognizably Daisy’s voice, and it was Daisy’s scent blowing in through the window as well. There was another voice too, but it turned out to be the mom yelling “Two and ten o’clock!” which was her way of advising Andromeda not to fill the bathtub up quite so quickly and to use less hot water. She had drawn little arrows and x marks on the tiles by the taps.
Call the police? And tell them what, exactly? “Someone is burning down my dead friend’s room.” Andromeda listened below the water for the familiar Daisy refrain “Fucking with you, Klein,” but if it was there, she could not discern it.
One thing she knew: the deformed cards in the dream recalled a series of paintings that Daisy had done for an art-class exhibition her sophomore (Andromeda’s freshman) year; she had painted and pasted over enlarged color copies of the Pixie-Waite cards to include whimsical features from Clearview High School culture and society. Andromeda wished she could consult the paintings but was doubtful they still existed. At any rate, though she was not about to call the police, it was clear she was meant to rescue the tarot deck in the Eye of Horus bag in the blackened cedar box from whatever fate might be awaiting it. She imagined Mizmac cutting the cards into strips with scissors and burning them in the patio fireplace. It had to be prevented.
Now, in the library’s Temple of Mercury, as she was closing up the cartomancy books and sniffing the air to determine whether she could smell Daisy mingling with the book smell she loved, she noticed something. Why had she thought the blindfolded girl in the Two of Swords was kneeling? She had looked at the card hundreds of times, and the kneeling image was clear in her mind. But looking at it now, she saw that the girl was not kneeling at all. She was seated on a bench or box of some kind. Strange how Andromeda had never noticed that before. The girl also seemed to be peeking from behind her blindfold, and her hands were … not very feminine—they were huge, in fact. What would happen if the Two of Swords girl was actually a boy?
This question strengthened rather than diminished Andromeda’s sense of the card as her significator, as it pointed to one of the recurring anxieties in her action-populated head, one that had resulted in several attempts to charge sigils derived from the statement “This is my wish to become more feminine.” Boys tended to lack enthusiasm for aero dynamic bodies like hers, though some girls could make it work. Despite Bryce’s claims to be attracted to her during the brief time they had technically been boyfriend-girlfriend, he hadn’t seemed too interested in touching her, despite considerable encouragement. And St. Steve: she hated to admit it, but he had been the same way, the main difference being the intensity of her wishes. Bryce was sweet, and Daisy had averred that he was cute, even, but he was not the sort of person to inspire passion in anyone.
The number two—that is, Chokmah—lies on the masculine Pillar of Mercy; perhaps that was what A.E. and Pixie were getting at with their Two of Swords design.
At any rate, when she really looked at the Two of Swords, it was a totally different card. There were no shallow pools as she had thought, like on so many of the other Swords cards; rather, the aerodynamic girl-boy was in the foreground of a lake or sea, with an island in the distance and two rocky formations in the midground. And she wasn’t really sitting on the box; it was more like she was floating above it. Or maybe she had just gotten up from kneeling and was now in the act of sitting down on the box. No wonder the Two of Swords made Andromeda think of her own box: there it was, underneath a hovering girl who was not quite feminine enough and who now looked to her a bit like a cemetery angel with swords for wings, the box a marble sarcophagus.
She put the cards back in the box, but then pulled them out again because she thought she had seen, out of the corner of her eye, the Tau-robed figure on the crest of the larger island behind the Two of Swords girl. She was mistaken. There was no one on the hill in the picture on the card. As an afterthought, she wrote down the cards she remembered from the dream, just in case they might have any divinatory or forensic significance: the Fool, the Hierophant, the Page of Cups, the Five of Cups, the Hermit, the High Priestess, and the Tower. That was seven of the ten cards in a Celtic Cross spread, leaving three unknown, unless the dancing Tau-robed one represented a card as well. If so, the Magician was a strong possibility—the figure might have been conducting a rite of some kind, and he might even have been juggling as well as tumbling. The fact that the girls’ bathroom spread had placed the Magician in the first “this covers you” position seemed to confirm that supposition. Strangely, Andromeda noted, Pixie’s Magician rather resembled the Two of Swords figure, giving the whole spread a curious symmetry.
Her quick, mouthed, surreptitious banishing ritual was interrupted by Darren Hedge, the reference librarian who supervised the pages. He was standing in front of her when she looked up.
“Do you feel like packing up Sylvester Mouse tonight?” he said. “Picking up some extra hours,” he meant. “We need to pull these books.”
Marlyne was going home “sick” again, and Weird Gordon, another page, was going to fill in for her at the desk. (“Sick” probably meant Marlyne was hanging out with Tommy the maintenance guy, with whom she was having a not-too-discreet affair.) Darren Hedge handed Andromeda a list that had been printed on the library’s ancient machine-type printer, a thick stack of paper accordion-folded along perforated lines, with the strip of holes on either side. Nearly an inch thick, which meant hundreds of books, probably.
“What’s it for?” she asked, but he had already disappeared, leaving the list behind.
Weird Gordon walked by on his way to the main desk, quietly singing a little song that went “Filling in for Marlyne, at the front desk, filling in for Marlyne …,” and clumsily swaying while he walked. It was perhaps the most annoying habit for a coworker to develop, Gordon’s little songs about everything he did. “Time to get out the stapler. Stapler!” “Everybody’s taking their break, in the break room, break room….”
“Gordon has a little crush on you,” Marlyne had once sung, parodying his singing style. “I’m picking up a vibe.” Marlyne was always “picking up vibes” and thought everyone had a crush on everybody else. Andromeda knew that, for her part, she could never come close to feeling attraction for a boy with such poor taste in shoes: today, despite the damp weather, he was wearing his mandals. For the love of Mike, as the dad would say in the Groucho voice when he was doing the corny dad routine, there was no excuse for that. She cracked herself up, though, imagining the song Gordon might sing if they were ever to hook up somehow: “Here we go unbuttoning, here we go unbuttoning, un buttoning Andromeda, Andromeda’s shirt from Savers, kickin’ off my mandals, my man sandals, kicking off my mandals….” Then she saw him smiling back at her and accelerating his clumsy dance, showing off, and she felt bad for encouraging him, so she lowered her eyes and turned her attention back to the book list.
It couldn’t be for interlibrary loan. There was no red I.L.L. ticket, and besides, it was just too many books. I.L.L. would be two or three at most, if any at all. The IHOB, that is, the International House of Bookcakes, had books that no other library in the system had, she knew, but people rarely requested them. When they did, and it was a significant title, it made her sick with worry, as it had a year ago when the library’s copy of
True and Faithful
had had to travel to Sacramento. This was a facsimile edition, now quite rare, of
A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee … and Some Spirits
(London, 1659), which she herself had once owned but had donated to the library for the public good and to protect it from the mom’s predations. It was the only copy to which she was likely to have access, and it was crucial to her studies. The book was returned safely three weeks later, to her immense relief. The
Blue Equinox
had come back with the seals cut out, by some profoundly small-minded occult dilettante, possibly a “goth” or heavy-metal rock fan, she imagined. Such people were around, a blight on the occult landscape, though fortunately they rarely had a long-enough attention span to do much damage. Frater Achad’s
Egyptian Revival
hadn’t come back at all, which was a shame because Andromeda wished at present to consult its countertraditional analysis of the tarot trumps that had stumbled through her dream.
She got a cart from the back room and began with the 000s. Generalities and Information. She had never read the first one on the list, but it looked interesting and she made a mental note to look at it when it was returned:
The Egyptian Miracle: An Introduction to the Wisdom of the Temple
. Following were three books by Robert Anton Wilson that she had always meant to check out. Packing up Sylvester Mouse that evening only got her through the 001s, because she spent most of the time standing by the cart in the stacks reading the temple book and thinking about numbers and swords and boxes, and about how a compass and straightedge were the only tools necessary to build the world.