by Emma Bull
“Ain’t but a hundred phones in the City. Don’t ring very often.”
“Yes, but I know how you hate to be disturbed on Fridays.” I twitched my nose like a cartoon rabbit. “Mmm. What an interesting new smell. Almost like… ” I let my voice taper politely off. Graceless, I thought, but functional.
Beano accepted three currencies: hard money, flesh and blood, and knowledge. He preferred the first two. I mostly used the third, often pointed in the opposite direction from the one he had in mind. Usually with a lighter hand, but I felt like the saint with all the arrows, and it was undercutting my judgment. (I’d given him money, too, when I had it, when I could afford it. But never the second alternative, never skin. Never.)
“Almost like what?” he said.
I pursed my lips. “No, forgive me, it couldn’t possibly have been. And if it was, I’m sure it’s perfectly legal.”
Beano leaned down and opened the back of the display case. I watched his hard white hands, their backs veiled with sparse but surprisingly long white hairs, their nails long and thick and filed sharp, moving delicately over the merchandise. It was like watching a cave spider. The fingertips passed over knives with blades inscribed in Spanish, over a necklace made from the stuffed skin of a rattlesnake, fangs intact, over a pair of engraved silver clasp bracelets welded together, back to back, their inside curves studded with little spines. I looked away.
“Here,” Beano said, and set something on the counter. I turned back. It was a little box, covered in dark red velvet and lined in black satin. Ranked neatly on the satin were six bone needles, their broad ends still flanged and rough and recalling the joint they’d once been part of, their long points polished bright. “Do you know what these are for?” Beano asked.
“No.”
“Do you want to know?”
I swallowed, because I couldn’t help it, even though I knew he’d see me do it. “No.”
He slammed the cash drawer and I jumped. He clenched his hands around the edge of the counter; the muscles in his forearm showed like rope. “Someday,” he said, “maybe I’ll show you.”
“Does that mean I can use the phone today?”
Beano smiled slowly. “Sure. Sure you can.” It’s possible to miss things you never had. Pay phones, desk phones, cellular phones, hot lines to Russia — they’re taken for granted in the old movies. Whatever it took to get a phone installed in those golden days, it must not have been as complex as the City’s system of influence, blackmail, and graft. And it must have resulted in something better than A.A. Albrecht’s collection of scratchy party lines.
The phone was on the wall of a room behind the shop, where the extra stock was stored. The thing on the front of the rack was made of paper-thin black leather and lined with rose-colored silk. The material was so light that it hung shapeless, unidentifiable. A garment, probably. But thin leather cords hung from it at intervals, and a strand of wire coiled down from one side. I tried not to look at it as I listened to the ringing of the phone on the top floor of Sherrea’s building. Eight rings. If no one answered — well, I could try again later. But that’s not how I felt. My pass with Beano seemed to have used up all my insouciance; suddenly it was desperately important to hear Sherrea’s voice, even if it was telling me to go to hell.
And at last, the life-giving click. “Eyeah?” Not one of her neighbors, but Sher herself. She sounded gritty beyond what the noisy connection would account for. Of course, I’d woken her; it was barely past noon.
“Sher? It’s Sparrow,” I half shouted into the tube.
“Mmh? Whaisit?”
“I need a reading.”
“Ah, shit. Whattaya think, I took a Hippocratic oath?” There was a moment’s pause before she said, “Call me when the moon’s out.”
“Sher—” My mouth opened to dicker, to offer her all the inducements, mythical and real, I could call to mind. In that moment, they seemed frail and faded. I shut my mouth and tried again, and found myself saying, “Sher… please?”
There was another crackling pause. “What’s wrong?” Alarm and suspicion mixed in the words, with suspicion leading.
“I just woke up on the river flats. Between now and nine-ish last night, I have a big gap where my life used to be.”
Silence on the other end. She bargained hard, but not as fast from straight out of bed. I could hear her trying to figure out how much my desperation was worth. “Uh-huh. And I can help.”
“Maybe,” I answered as the dickering impulse reasserted itself at last.
“Chica, this is gonna cost you.”
“I’m good for it, Sher.”
“What do you mean,” she said ominously, “you’re good for it?”
“One of the things that happened while I was down is that my money went away.”
“Get some more.”
“It’s, ah, in my other pants. Which are locked up in the Night Fair.”
“Where are you calling from?”
“Del Corazón.”
“What’d you give Beano?”
“Threats and promises,” I answered.
Sherrea said some things in a language I didn’t recognize. Then she said, “It’s a long walk, and you deserve it. Or are you planning to scam a lift out of some poor bastard?”
Twelve blocks and four flights. Well, after that nice restful ride… “I’m walking.”
“You’re gonna owe me, Sparrow. Got that?”
“Yes, I’ll owe you.” I felt suddenly, grovelingly, indecently grateful. Another debit for the ledger — but to Sherrea. I’d never known Sherrea to deal in flesh and blood.
“Get here in less than twenty minutes and I’ll cook your flat ass for breakfast.”
It took me thirty. I followed the route around the east flank of the Night Fair, where spindly locust trees cast a little shade. Sometimes I had to cling to the fence, when the curve of the world became too much to climb. Sometimes I just sat on the curb and panted and clutched my head. Two little black kids with the copper earrings of the Leopard Society threw fragments of paving at me. I scooped a handful of dust out of the boulevard plantings, spit into it, and closed my fingers over it, chanting at random, bastard Spanish, Creole, Lao. Then I stared at the kids. They made a great show of nonchalance, but they left. Which was nice; what was I going to do when I blew my handful of dust at them, and they didn’t turn into lumps of clay, or get leprosy, or whatever they expected?
Away from the Fair, the traffic was heavier. I dodged bicycles and the occasional motorbike, as well as pedestrians more determined than I was, which was all of them. A silver sedan with smoked windows and the insignia of a northside greenkraal nearly put an end to my problems out in the middle of LaSalle. I jumped for the center island as the tires squealed. All’s well that isn’t over.
And all the while I watched for a filthy tri-wheeler, listening for its clotted growling. I had no idea what I’d do if I saw it.
Sherrea’s building was smooth dirty yellow tile and rows of too-small windows, with a door that used to be glass and was now rather more practical armor-gray steel. It was built in the last century, when prosperity must have excused ugliness. The halls had once been blank and identical, the stairwells featureless tubes of concrete block and iron stair rail. Now living ivy worked its way toward the sky at the top of the stairs, where someone had turned a trapdoor into an open skylight; wisteria cascaded down to meet it from the roof. Things peered from the leaves: grotesque carved wooden faces, old photographs of people who all seemed to be smiling, faded postcards. A painted snake twined up the stair rail: red, black, and yellow on the first floor; blue, gray, and green on the second; purple, green, and orange on the third; blue, red, and yellow on the fourth. Fat candles stood in former floor lamps on every landing.
The stairwell doors were numbered, as if the residents wouldn’t be able to keep track when they came home. The “4” was an elongated green man in a loincloth, one arm held out and bent. By the time I climbed that far, I was glad to se
e him. The hall behind him was painted with frescoes of vacant Roman courtyards. Sher’s door was the middle of a fountain; I knocked on a painted nymph’s tummy.
Sherrea had her face on, and layers and layers of black and purple clothing. The astral colors of sorcerers, she’d told me once. Her black hair was wet and had been combed flat to her head, but that wouldn’t last long. There was a cigarette between her white-painted lips, smoked nearly down to the filter.
Her big dark eyes got bigger when she saw me, and it made her look almost as young as she was. “Sparrow. Blessed goddamn Virgin,” she said around the cigarette. “Get in here and lie down.”
“I’ve been lying down,” I said, thinking of the river flats.
“Not in any way that was good for you. You’ve got some kinda shit in you, chica. What is it?”
Either she really is psychic, or I wasn’t looking my usual sleek self. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there when it happened. I’ve probably got some sunstroke as well.”
“Oya. Well, you’re not gonna sit in my living room like that.”
She drew me a bath. She was prepared to drop me in it herself, but I declined firmly. She insisted that I leave my clothes outside the bathroom door, so she could wash them (an unexpectedly practical gesture from Sherrea). I did, and locked the door.
Her bathroom was the place in the apartment that looked most like hers. Dark — probably where she put her makeup on. Paisley shawls, ferns shaped like visitors from outer space, incense, brass bowls. Mismatched glass jars (from jelly and peanut butter and salsa, elevated beyond their stations) full of dried leaves and flowers and powders, with a combined scent that called to mind medicines and hot metal. The mirror was like a pool half seen through vegetation; it was swagged with velvet draperies dimly printed with flowers that all looked carnivorous.
I was in the bath for a long time. I might have even fallen asleep; I know that when Sherrea pounded on the door and shouted, “Did you kill yourself in my goddamn bathroom?” I sat up with a jerk, my heart slamming in my chest like a moth against a window. Water lapped over the side and splatted on the floor. It wasn’t warm water anymore, I noticed.
When I stood up out of the tub, my reflection appeared in the velvet-hung mirror like a doppelganger in a forest clearing. There was just enough light for me to see the discolored lump on the side of my cheek. The rest of my face was an interesting ghoulish hue. Bloodless. I decided that Sher was jealous; she always tried to look like a vampire in training. No wonder the woman on the tri-wheeler, she of the sixty or so names, had thought she’d run me down. I looked as if she had, and then backed over me, too. I found a comb among the glassware and worked it through my hair, but I couldn’t find anything to tie it up with.
I had to wear a bedsheet out into the living room. The sheet was striped in red, white, and blue, and I wondered what Sher did with it when it wasn’t wrapped around a damp customer. I couldn’t imagine her sleeping on it. The living room had a reprocessed nylon/cellulose carpet in green, and walls like the outside of an eggplant, shiny and dark purple. I don’t know what color the ceiling was; it was draped with a parachute, suspended in tentlike folds and billows. The genuine item, complete to the stains and scorches and holes it acquired during the festivities just before the Big Bang. I don’t know why Sher had it there. I liked to think it was an icon of the second Fall, a new apple. There were things sewn to it, and hanging from it: a child’s mitten, a blue rosary, a half-melted 45 rpm record, a clutch of shiny foil-cardboard stars. On one wall was a print in overwrought colors showing Saint Bob holding a broken guitar. The furniture was all cushions, except for a sofa that sat too low because the legs were lopped off, and a metal cabinet lying on its side, painted black and draped with a tapestry that seemed to be not quite a view of the Last Supper. The shades were drawn, and the room was dim and smelled of candle smoke and flowers. I felt a little guilty, adding the red-white-and-blue sheet to all that ambience.
I went to the window and bent the blinds a little to look outside. The shadows had swallowed up the bottoms of the buildings; it was nearly sunset. “How long have I been here?” I wondered aloud.
“Forever,” Sher answered from the kitchen. She came in and sat down on a heap of pillows on the other side of the metal cabinet. She had a new cigarette pinned in the corner of her mouth. She set a glass of water in front of me and sighed. “I had to cancel three other appointments. I don’t know why the fuck you come and bother me. It’s not as if you believed in any of it.”
“Of course I believe in it. You, as someone who has more insight into me than I do, use the cards to reveal my sins to me and make me meditate on them. It used to be called psychotherapy.”
“That’s not what happens.”
“Well, if it works, let’s not fix it.” That, at least, I could say with perfect sincerity. There was no point in arguing with Sherrea over how she did what I hoped she was going to do.
“There’s no food in the place,” she said.
“That’s okay.” I didn’t think I could eat, anyway. My stomach felt like a sink drain full of hair.
“No, it’s not. You ought to eat before a reading, and leave some as an offering. It draws the energies to you.” She shrugged. “Well, screw the energies.”
“No.”
She glanced up, the young look on her pointy face again.
“Let’s do it right.” On one thumb, I found a rough bit of cuticle, at the base of the nail. I bit it until it bled. “Offering,” I said, and held out my hand.
“Santos, Sparrow.” But she whisked the tapestry off the cabinet/coffee table, and from somewhere in all the black-and-purple, she produced a wad of white scarf. When she laid it down, it fell open to show the deck of cards inside. “Let a drop fall on the table — no, over there on the corner. I don’t want it on the scarf.” I squeezed a decent-sized drop onto the very edge of the metal, and blotted the rest on one of the sheet’s red stripes.
She mashed her cigarette out on the side of the cabinet and began to shuffle the deck. It arced between her hands, over and over, two parts folding into one like a flower blooming backward in time-lapse. “Wish for something. D’you think maybe you were on polygons?”
“If I had any idea, I wouldn’t have had to come to you.”
She fanned the cards on the table, flipped one out of the deck onto the scarf, shuffled again. Page of Swords.
She said she’d found the deck in a botánica in Alphabetland. It was luridly colored, worse than Saint Bob, and the figures moved when you tipped the cards, like printed cardboard toys and kitschy postcards. The iconography was a schizoid blend of Christian saints, African deities, and pre-Bang SouthAm pop stars. The Page of Swords was Joan of Arc at the stake, holding a sword over her head. The flames leaped and Joan’s head nodded up to look at heaven, down to study hell. “You don’t know what you took. You really black out completely during these things?” Sher asked.
“I told you I do.”
“You’ve told me lots of dumb shit. That was the seventeenth card. Whatever you just wished for, you can’t have. Cut the deck.”
I wondered what it had been.
She snapped cards down on the scarf, growing the layout like a crystal. Joan of Arc’s suffering was overlaid upside down by Death as Baron Samedi, all bones and grin and tall black hat, with a victim under each arm: a fat white man in a pinstripe suit, and an old black woman almost as thin as the Baron. The Baron opened and closed his mouth — laughing, I’d guess — and the victims flapped their arms. Beside him went a card showing a naked brown prettyboy holding a violent yellow solar disc in front of his hips. The rays of the sun rippled when the card moved, which seemed like a waste of technology.
Snap — an overdressed black man juggling two bags, each marked with a white star. That one was upside down, too. Snap — a grinning masked figure stepping into shadow at the back of the card, a fan of five bloody swords over his shoulder. In the foreground two more thrust, point downward, in a puddle of gor
e with no apparent source. Snap — a man and woman dressed in movie-medieval, she in white, he in red, hands clasped; a huge, well-fed cherub like a scrubbed pink pterodactyl hovered above. Snap — a nearly naked blond woman with a quarterstaff, blocking the attack of six ninjoids, also with staves. Snap — a dark-haired, dark-tanned man or woman, lying on his or her back on a beach. The posture I’d awakened in on the river flats. He or she had ten long swords for company, the points in the palms of the hands, the knees, the belly, the groin, the breasts, the forehead, and through the open mouth. I stopped paying such close attention. Sherrea laid three more cards down.
“Swords,” she muttered, tapping her long purple index fingernail on the spiral made by the first seven cards. “Swords here in the country of flesh. There’s fighting over this, has been and will be.”
Between me, myself and I? I wanted to ask.
“Death, the Sun, the Lovers. Lots of major arcana. Your future’s controlled by others. There’s powerful people playing with it. You’re gonna have to fight to get it back. And over here” — she slid the fingernail down the silk next to the upright row of four cards next to the spiral — “this is the country of truth. There’s the Devil, the Star, the Tower. In the country of truth, where your spirit lives, your life still isn’t your own. Other stronger spirits, or maybe gods — they’ve got the say in what happens to you.”
A nice metaphor for my blackouts.
She touched the juggling man. “Something got out of balance in the past, yours or somebody’s. Stuff that’s supposed to shift around, change, grow — it’s all gone stagnant and sick.”
Sherrea looked up, but it was a blind look. “The air’s not moving around you,” she said, “but there’s a wind that’s trying to blow. Somebody’s gotta pull the windbreak down.” Her voice was changing. Now she wasn’t looking at me at all; she was looking at the tops of her eye sockets. All I could see were the whites. I rocked slowly back from the cabinet.
