Andromeda Klein

by Frank Portman

  ii.

  Why did Andromeda Klein want Den to retrieve Daisy’s tarot deck all of a sudden? It was because Daisy was coming back to life and had instant-messaged her in a dream.

  Daisy’s death from leukemia the year before had been sudden. Andromeda certainly hadn’t expected it. She had returned from the deeply regretted family trip to Mount Shasta, full of St. Steve anxiety, only to discover that Daisy was gone forever. Remission is only remission until it’s not, and what they had celebrated as a cure had turned out not to be in the end. The week before the Shasta trip, just as St. Steve had abandoned her with his horrible “hi there,” Daisy had also broken up with her, as she did from time to time. This meant a total cutoff of communication, and the cold shoulder at school, followed by a subsequent reconciliation, if Andromeda tried hard enough and gave Daisy presents.

  One of the mom’s many accusations against Andromeda was that she lacked the capacity to feel guilt. There might have been some truth in that, despite the trivial nature of the mom’s complaints. Was it possible for anyone to feel truly guilty about using the wrong cup or walking down stairs on the wrong side or failing to hold toast the right way? Guilt of any kind was usually little more than regret plus embarrassment, with a bit of showing off added. Yet with Daisy, Andromeda had felt something close to guilt, not only because of the trip (which had left Daisy to do a planned Operation of Magick alone) but also because St. Steve had been a strain on their friendship right to the end. Andromeda had kept him as secret as she could, as she’d promised, though Daisy had suspected and had tried everything—from threats to pleading to trickery—to uncover the details. Andromeda had let a few things slip, and Daisy had been able to guess a few more; but Andromeda, usually a pushover, had never given in. In time, it might have blown over, as things do, but of course there had been no time. Daisy had died resentful and abandoned, and now there was no remedy.

  It should have been easy to predict: everything about Shasta had portended doom. Andromeda had felt like a dead thing, and the landscape had mirrored her mood. Lemurian remnants were reputed to live in tunnels under Mount Shasta, were said to pay for provisions in local shops with mysterious gold nuggets and to conduct rituals and experiments that caused the strange light sometimes seen crowning the Northern Californian mountains. It was, ironically, the main reason she had consented to go to Lake Shasta in the first place, hoping to bring back the results of her Lemurian investigations as a peace offering to the sullen, silent Daisy. She thought she might have seen one, too, and had returned eager to tell Daisy all about the tall, misshapen shadow man she had glimpsed briefly in a headlight flash, and about the other sheets of blue fire she believed she had seen above trees beyond bends in the road. But the trip had been cursed. There had been an unpleasant, ill atmosphere around the lake. The ’rents had been grim and unbearable. On the tense drive home they had passed an overturned truck on fire. In movies, flaming vehicles always exploded, and Andromeda had braced herself for it, and might even have welcomed a fiery end, but the explosion had never come.

  It was as though somehow her family’s craziness had been amplified and the landscape was reflecting it. Andromeda had attributed these phenomena to Lemurian experiments, but later it seemed they might be read as the reverberations of Daisy’s cataclysmic slide into death. The fiery truck suggested the Tower, the most ominous of the tarot trumps, and the shadowy Lemurian had looked a bit like the Hermit. As a pair, they suggested catastrophe and isolation, a prediction borne out in spades.

  Daisy had returned none of Andromeda’s messages. Andromeda had assumed it was because Daisy was angry with her over St. Steve. But it had turned out she was not angry but rather dead; or she might have been angry as well as dead. Den eventually told her, in the same breath with which he also informed her that he was no longer allowed to speak to her himself. It had been during the week of St. Steve estrangement that Daisy had reentered the hospital, and in the midst of the Shasta week she had been dying of “respiratory complications.” Andromeda considered that she had every right to feel aggrieved that she had been kept out of the picture. Why did Andromeda experience this sense of injustice as self-reproach and guilt and regret for things not done or poorly managed? Such inversions happen when people die in the midst of things, which is the only way they ever die. At least it proved the mom wrong about Andromeda and guilt, if proof about the mom’s being wrong were ever needed.

  Andromeda had not even been told about the memorial service. “You need to put those females on a leash,” Mizmac had screamed into the phone to Andromeda’s dad, in response to an e-mail from Andromeda’s mother accusing her of denying “closure” to Daisy’s best friend in such a difficult time.

  Leave it to the mom to get both the etiquette and the facts so wrong. They had loved each other, but Andromeda had hardly been Daisy’s best friend. Daisy had had many friends, including but not limited to the ones who were even now watching horror films and guzzling, inhaling, snorting, or doing only the gods knew what at Afternoon Tea. Andromeda had never been in doubt about her place, and it wasn’t “best.” “Who’s the main character and who’s the sidekick?” Daisy and Rosalie and the others would sometimes ask when they were trying to flirt with boys who traveled in twos. No one would ever have asked that question about Andromeda and Daisy. Not her best friend: her sidekick, rather; her assistant, her secretary, her … minion. In the New New Temple of T ∴ H ∴ T ∴ they had been sorors, “sisters” in Latin, but Andromeda had been like the kid sister even though they were the same age. In formal temple mode, Andromeda had addressed her as cara soror, “dear sister.” Daisy usually said merely: “Klein.” Which means, and by which she meant, “little.”

  At any rate, “closure” was scarcely possible. For months, in fact, Andromeda had found it difficult to believe Daisy could really be dead. Daisy had moved to Chicago, Andromeda had told herself, to live with her father; the death had been faked in order to allow her to start off fresh with all new friends, and especially to keep Andromeda’s allegedly bad influence away from her. Andromeda had even tried dialing a few Wasserstrom numbers in the Chicago area just to see if Daisy might answer. “Paranoid runs in the family,” said the mom, not shy about drawing a comparison to the dad’s worries about shadowy supragovernmental conspiracies. In fact, the Chicago calling was an idle ritual, but Daisy’s presence was very strong, particularly in those first months. Daisy, Andromeda felt, was still there somehow, somewhere, even if not exactly in Chicago.

  Memories of dead people rely on standing still, and for a time Andromeda’s mind had been nearly as frozen as Daisy’s bedroom. Nevertheless, the Universe continued to expand at its stately pace, violent up close, beautiful and seemingly still at a distance. Each person’s tiny, individual world can feel the tremors. This item shifts, that article falls, while yet another breaks apart and crumbles. The new arrangement settles and becomes the norm. That is Death, Key XIII, the aggregate of tiny deaths that make up time, the new worlds that continually replace old or damaged ones. Eventually periods of several days would go by and she would realize with shock that she had hardly thought of Daisy at all. That is how dead people fade and gradually disappear from the present time. Those who survive always try to resist the process, preserving a little house for the nephesh, the animal soul, to inhabit and feeding it with attention and inadvertent rituals of remembrance, as Mizmac had clearly done. Eventually, though, this shadow fades to near nothingness, to sentimental memories and vague feelings of loss and guilt amongst loved ones.

  That was how it had been with Daisy, until the last couple of weeks, when her nephesh had seemed to stop fading. It was as though Daisy’s scattered remnants were attempting to reassemble themselves and as though Daisy herself were steadily coming back to life.

  The first thing Andromeda had noticed was Daisy’s scent. It had manifested without warning during Wellness one day; then she had smelled it again at the library, later on at home, once in the supermarket, and once even w
hile riding in the mom’s car, coming through the vents. It was very strong, and instantly recognizable: the citrus shampoo, the candy-flavored lip gloss, the vinyl coat, and a vague hint of cinnamon, perhaps, plus a damp, sour-sweet Daisy element she couldn’t quite identify. After so many months of absence, this scent’s reappearance had been dramatic. At first she had walked around sniffing, looking, she knew, like a crazy person. Soon, and bit by bit, Andromeda became accustomed to the reality that some rooms would randomly smell like Daisy.

  The smell phenomenon was soon followed by visual synchs and manifestations. Daisy, or others who looked a lot like her, would appear in Andromeda’s peripheral vision, only to disappear or assume another shape when she tried to look at them directly. Daisy also began to turn up more and more often in dreams, usually as a little girl pretty much as Andromeda remembered her from childhood, or as a corpse. She would appear in tarot spreads in the form of moon cards and Cups and watery images juxtaposed with flowers—Daisy Wasserstrom meant “water streaming over a daisy,” and she was, or had been, a Cancer with her moon in Aries. Sometimes the indications were tricky and clever, as when Andromeda had happened to find two twenty-dollar bills in her copy of Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Andromeda had, of course, absentmindedly left them there and forgotten about them, but as for the significance: two twenties, i.e., 2020, just happened to be the number of the letters in the name Daisy Wasserstrom according to Agrippa’s system of Latin gematria. That could hardly be a coincidence.

  She soon began to hear, or rather, half hear, Daisy’s voice sometimes, speaking unclear syllables, not in her head, but as though Daisy were standing somewhere behind her. Andromeda would respond with her characteristic “What?” and pull her hair back from her ear and turn around, but the voice would go dead and there would be no one there.

  What were the powers of an unfading dead person? Could they make phones ring? Knock you off your bike? Hide your keys? Disrupt your TV reception or lock you out of your house? Bill you for unwanted magazine subscriptions and move your car to the wrong side of the street? Such things seemed to happen quite often at Casa Klein. The mom would usually find a way to blame the dad for such phenomena; the dad would suspect the government; but Andromeda always wondered if it might not be Daisy, coming back to life and trying to attract attention, and no doubt enjoying the chaos. If spirits from beyond knew all, and if Daisy had indeed become such a spirit, the truth about St. Steve would no longer be hidden from her. Indeed, she might know more than Andromeda knew herself. Perhaps she had a message to impart. Or perhaps the malice remained, and Daisy’s goal was simply to haunt her.

  There was a game Andromeda had played ever since she was small, a game called “What would happen if?” More often than you’d think, the idle propositions had a way of coming out true. What would happen if she got kicked out of the Gnome School? she had once wondered: bang, the Kleins could no longer afford the tuition and Andromeda wound up in public school, though she hadn’t been kicked out. What would happen if St. Steve disappeared and no longer cared for her? Bang, “hi there.” This could be seen as a kind of perverse magic. She had learned to be very careful about questions silently asked, though some inevitably slipped out.

  So when Andromeda had asked herself, in an idle moment, what would happen if spirits or demons could communicate with the here and now using instant messaging, in the same way they sometimes used Ouija boards or appeared in crystals or mirrors like Dr. Dee’s angels, the result was: bang, she began to imagine she could see, on occasion, a little instant-message window pop up in the upper left corner just beyond her field of vision, sending her a message that was usually too dim to read. When she tried to follow it with her eyes it would slide off and vanish into her peripheral vision. When it happened in dreams, her eyes were usually bound or her lids glued shut so she couldn’t see the window, or the message would be written in a language she didn’t understand.

  What would happen if Daisy came back and sent her messages? It looked as though Andromeda was going to find out.

  In the IM dream of the previous night, the message had read:

  Call the police.

  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 s
eemed 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.