More Stories from the Twilight Zone (25 page)

“Can't you draw just one card?” Grandma pleaded. “See what it tells you?”

“I shuffle,” Marj insisted, accepting the cards. “And cut.”

“That is how it is always done.”

The cards were worn, polished with long use, but crisp enough that they shuffled with appropriate clatter and snap. Marj riffled the pack together enough times that she was certain any attempt to stack the deck would have been defeated.

(“But this is a dream,” a small part of her mind screamed in protest. “This entire vision is a stacked deck.”)

Marj cut the deck a half inch from the bottom, rather than near the middle as was usual. Then, peeking up through her lashes so she could see Grandma Gloria's reaction without the other realizing she was being observed, Marj held up the card for the older woman to see.

Instead of the satisfaction or smugness Marj had expected, she saw puzzlement flicker across the lined features.

“That isn't a card from my deck,” Grandma whispered, and for the first time Marj looked to see what she'd drawn.

The card showed an androgynous figure in a chariot drawn by two horses, one black, one white. Although the horses were not pulling against each other, there was a sense that what kept them in cooperation was the firm confidence of the driver holding the reins.

“The Charioteer,” Marj read the legend on the card. “You say this isn't what it looks like in your deck?”

“No. I always used the Rider-Waite deck. The Charioteer in that deck wears armor and his chariot is shown behind paired sphinxes, black and white.” Grandma Gloria looked at Marj almost shyly. “Does this card say anything to you, child?”

“Balance,” Marj said, speaking the first word that had come to mind when she looked at the card, “like in Plato's tale of the charioteer. Plato says that the soul is like a chariot pulled by two winged horses: the rough, passionate black horse and the powerful, spiritual white horse. Plato's message was that we need both horses but, unless the charioteer carefully manages his team, the chariot will go in circles and no progress will be made.”

Marj felt her heart racing, words tumbling from her mouth almost before her mind could shape them.

“It's like Freud: the id, the ego, and the superego. The Id contains our base, animal passions. It is the fountain from which our spirit springs.

“The Ego embodies the rational self, the sense of ‘I' as distinct from the rest of the universe. Various philosophers—Descartes, Kant, Hume, and others—sought to explain the Ego, feeling that if we understood the Ego, we would come closer to understanding the individual in relation to society at large.

“The Superego contains what we learn from our teachers, our advisors. The Superego is what harmonizes the Id and Ego. It
provides an awareness that the universe is larger than ourselves, that we must function with an awareness of this greater scheme or become deluded that we are somehow central to all.”

Grandma Gloria looked overwhelmed at this flood of words. Marj felt herself grinning.

“It's okay, Grandma. Really, it's okay. You want me to choose to accept what you call the Second Sight, but the way you present the choice it's as if I need to wrap myself up like a gypsy fortuneteller, get a deck of cards, and deny everything else I know. What this card is telling me is that I can have both. I can have it all. Black horse. White horse. Me at the reins.”

She laughed. After an moment, Grandma Gloria laughed with her.

“Then I can rest?” the old woman asked, hesitant still.

“That's your choice,” Marj said. “You've kept telling me that neither death nor destiny can be denied. You've been fighting death, trying to force me into a destiny you chose for me. Listen to your own words. You never were speaking to me. You were speaking to yourself.”

And with that, Marj rose, bent, and kissed the old woman on one age-wrinkled cheek. There was a door visible now between two of the brightly burning candles, and Marj walked through it.

 

Marj was sitting at her kitchen table. She might have been tempted to believe that, after her rough night, she had drifted off to sleep again and spilled her coffee.

But words written with the coffee said: “Good-bye and God Bless.”

And in her hand Marj grasped a tarot card emblazoned with the Charioteer.

 

 

Heart and head. Intellect and soul. Like Marj, we believe we must choose one over the other. The truth is so much more complex, so much more difficult. We all live between these two extremes. We all live in our own personal Twilight Zone.

 

Meet, if you will, Stanley Rossini, a pleasant enough octogenarian who made his fortune writing best-selling police procedurals and whose thoughts are filled with the criminals and detectives who traipse through the big, bad city in his mind. Stanley worries about becoming a victim, like some of his fictional characters did, becoming one more statistic on a police blotter. One more number crunched. And so he lives in a small town, keeps all of his doors locked, and one day tries to feed his loneliness by inviting inside the wrong soul.

Josh didn't mind the smell of geezers. Good thing, since he spent a few hours every day—save Sundays and holidays—delivering food to their tidy little run-down homes.

The women usually smelled of bargain-brand perfumes they'd lathered on to war with the disinfectants sloshed all over their kitchens.

The men smelled musty, of old clothes slick-shiny-thin at the knees and elbows and a bit too baggy—shirts and pants that had an assortment of stinks and stains on the front from being dribbled on, and that Goodwill would flip a rejecting finger at if given the opportunity—but the geezers just couldn't part with because they lacked the disposable income and desire to go out shopping for something better. Sometimes the men also smelled of cheap cigars because on their pensions they couldn't afford the good
kind, and of Vicks VapoRub or Bengay or some other pungent ointment Josh had learned to tolerate quite well.

He found Stanley Rossini to be a pleasant exception to the rest of his clients, and so he often took his proverbial sweet time when delivering Stanley's Meals on Wheels.

Stanley always smelled of a hint of expensive aftershave, a touch of fine whiskey, and wore over the top of his pressed linen shirts designer-brand sweaters so new there hadn't been time for even the smallest nub to appear. His pants had a pressed crease down the front—never a wrinkle, the cuffs brushing the tops of his polished black leather loafers . . . Italian, Josh wagered, because they looked like ones George Clooney wore in a romantic vineyard-set comedy he saw at the budget cineplex.

Stanley's house wasn't little or run-down, but it was tidy, and everywhere in his kitchen, dining room, and den—Josh had not yet seen the rest of the place—were antiques of various sizes that didn't have a mote of dust on them. Stanley had a housekeeper come by on Mondays and Thursdays to keep the place spotless; Josh had met her once in passing. Also on display were an assortment of trophies and poster-sized framed book covers featuring guys with guns and wide-eyed women in fishnet stockings. Josh had learned during his second delivery that Stanley had been quite the writer in his younger years and was not shy about displaying his accomplishments.

As usual, Josh rang the bell and waited ten toe-taps. And equally as usual, Stanley opened the door, motioned Josh into the living room, and then with a flick of his age-spotted hand, gestured him toward the kitchen beyond. Stanley was careful to double-latch the door behind him, put on the chain, and re-key the security system.

“Just set my lunch up on the table, Joshua, if you don't mind. The good china today, the Royal Copenhagen. I'll get to it in a few minutes. Oh, and a pitcher of ice water. Have to deal with my
company first. A reporter from the local paper's come to interview me about my new book.”

Josh had registered the woman seated on the leather couch, notebook in hand, tiny tape recorder whirring away on the coffee table next to a Japanese teapot and cups. This was the first time Josh had seen Stanley entertain anyone. He sat the food sack on the mahogany table and went to the cabinet for a plate, being especially quiet so he could hear the conversation in the other room.

“I'm almost finished with the final draft,” Stanley told the woman. “Another week, two at the most, then it'll be back to the publisher and ready to go to print.”

The old man had a soft voice, and so Josh slipped closer to the doorway so he wouldn't miss anything. He was pissed about the woman's presence, as he'd intended to pocket another Hummel figurine from the knickknack shelf on the wall behind the couch—no way that would happen with both of them sitting there. Josh was an expert on Hummel. The previous pieces he swiped from Stanley—one from that shelf and another from the desk in the den—“Umbrella Girl” and “Umbrella Boy” respectively—he'd sold for $1,200 each on eBay. Stanley also had an assortment of Royal Doulton figurines in a curio cabinet that Josh intended to pick from. And that would be just the tip of the pilfering iceberg.

Also in the curio cabinet were museum-quality Capodimonte gnomes, a set of seven of them, all playing musical instruments, in near-mint condition and made sometime between 1760 and 1800. Josh had researched the pieces and placed their value at $14,000 for the lot. Beneath them on the bottom shelf was a Meissen nineteenth-century figural grouping of Diana the Huntress in a chariot drawn by a pair of white elks, the color intense. It was worth at least as much as the gnomes. Stanley had made an off-handed comment two Meals on Wheels deliveries past that his deceased wife—God bless her beautiful soul—had inherited all sorts of figurines from a great-great uncle. Stanley kept them around to honor her memory.

Josh intended to honor her memory by selling Diana and her elks to the highest bidder sometime next week . . . along with the two terribly rare Russian Imperial porcelain fairy-tale figurines that had to have been crafted by Sabanin. The latter would go for a solid ten thousand, and the arctic white fox by Cybis on the curio's top shelf would go for more than that, as it was number forty of one hundred (Josh had taken a peek at it when Stanley was in the bathroom) and signed, no chips or cracks, and at ten inches across too big to slip in his pocket.

Three weeks ago on eBay Josh had sold an old Vincent Jerome Dubois cockatoo for a mere $3,000. He'd nabbed that from a geezer's house on Washington Street, another unsuspecting Meals on Wheels client. And a week before that, from a geezer in a rental unit, he'd managed to lift a figurine of St. George mounted on a white horse and slaying a dragon. The detail was exquisite, from the Italian studio of Pattarino, who was known for giving his pieces to dignitaries visiting the Vatican. Josh suspected he'd underpriced it at $4,000.

“Four thousand, that's how many copies of my first book sold. This one, they're going to start the print run at four hundred thousand, I understand. Never thought I'd finish the book. Never thought I'd tell my editor I was done with the first draft. Been working on it two long years. They used to take me only a few months to write, a book. But ‘back in the day' a book only had to be about fifty thousand words, give or take. The publishers want double that now. More complex characters, too. More violence.”