“Here’s what happened: the earth revolved, the rain fell on the fields, and the Little Crystal Ruler of Men earned thirty dollars before taxes working in the public sector.” That was Alternative Universe Andromeda. Regular Universe Andromeda simply left the room. As the mom continued the bone-picking she had mentioned earlier, remaining at the computer and shouting out rapid-fire complaints about insufficient this and excessive that, Andromeda settled down in the living room to study her Teach Yourself Hebrew book and tuned her out as best she could. There was a phrase from the most recent Language Arts handout that seemed to sum up the mom’s philosophy on parenting and domestic organization. The wizard Merlin has turned the boy King Arthur into an ant, and the sign on the gate of the ant colony reads: EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY. Andromeda was an ant, crushed by a heavy maternal boot of iron. The mom had presumably absorbed these methods in her childhood in Australia under the Nazis.
Downstairs, the Champlain baby was screaming and the Champlains were screaming and it sounded like there was someone on the television screaming too. Andromeda’s defective ears tended to screen out important information like syllables while still managing to pick up the irritating background noise. It didn’t help that certain low tones from the sound track of whatever the Champlains were watching made the whole building vibrate abrasively. She could feel it in her back teeth. Andromeda’s dad insisted that the cable be disconnected and the TV unplugged when not in use, so she had to stoop and reconnect everything before settling back on the couch. She picked up the remote and found the channel they were watching downstairs, not because she wanted to watch TV, which she didn’t often like, but just in order to create a slightly less chaotic atmosphere where the sounds all matched. It was a movie in which a puzzle man was drugging people and sewing their mouths shut.
Soon the dad emerged carrying a circuit board and some other bits extracted from the now-destroyed appliance, a “See, what did I tell you?” look on his face.
Andromeda’s father suspected the government of spying on American citizens by implanting surveillance devices in electronic products. All the manufacturers and the governments and the corporations that control them were in on it. He had several boxes of extracted circuit boards and other electronic parts, collected over a lifetime, carefully dated and labeled, evidence for the book he claimed he was planning to write on Surveillance and the State; accordingly, the carport in the back was filled with appliances that no longer worked, alongside all the recording and music equipment he collected from yard sales and pawnshops and never seemed to use for anything.
The dad frowned at the TV. It is well known, he often said, that the FBI keeps files on everything you watch, and that the cable could transmit information to them even as it brainwashed, which was a neat trick. It would have been safest to have no television in the house at all, but unfortunately there was no other way to watch sports. Even the supermarkets keep track of all your purchases for use against you later, which is why it was best to vary your patterns and shop at different places, and to buy everything with cash whenever possible, though new bills shouldn’t be handled more than necessary because they put toxins in the ink that absorb into the skin and can be used to track you as well.
“You hear them?” he said, shaking his head. “They’re talking about us again.” He whispered: “Stalkers.” He meant the Champlains, or the government, or some other shadowy organization; in his view someone was always stalking, or scheming, or up to no good.
The mom scuttled in. All three Kleins were rarely in the same room at the same time.
“Your tea water, Andromeda!” she said. “You should eat something, not just tea. It’s an appetite suppressant.” Then: “You shouldn’t boil the water so hot, it’s not good for the bleeding helmet.” Heating element, perhaps? “What are you watching? That’s terrible. You’ll give us all nightmares….”
Andromeda and the dad briefly shared a look of wonder over the concept of boiling water too hot.
“,” said the dad, after a pause, which made Andromeda crack up in spite of herself after a moment of thumbing through the glossary at the back of her Hebrew book.
The mom glared with suspicion.
“I think he said ‘Where’s the bathroom?’” said Andromeda.
“Well, there’s a surprise,” said the mom, speaking fluent sitcom.
Andromeda had had no idea that the dad knew any Hebrew. It was difficult to learn the language from a book. Many of the letters were so similar, and she was always getting them wrong. She was studying it mainly to help with her understanding of the Holy Qabalah and gematria, the ancient art of rendering words and sentences into numbers and drawing correspondences between them, which was an important part of magick training and practice. But she also imagined a day when, after years of study, she might find herself, like Dame Frances in the Warburg or A.E. in the British Library reading room, in a vast library of ancient, secret texts of occult lore; and what use would such a library be without a working knowledge of Hebrew? She had a lot of catching up to do, as her current education was essentially worthless for her purposes.
“I was a religious fanatic in a previous life,” said the dad. “They try to get you while you’re young.” One of the stickers on the back of his van said BAD RELIGION and had a cross inside a red circle-slash; another said RELIGION IS CHILD ABUSE. That sentiment was presumably why he had opted to raise Andromeda as Nothing. There was also THE STATE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND and a fish with feet that said DARWIN instead of Jesus. The dad wasn’t a big fan of the Pledge of Allegiance, either.
The dad was still talking. Part of whatever he said next sounded a bit like “Punch and Judyism” or it might have actually been “Judaism”—the dad and her poor hearing had similar senses of humor sometimes.
“The reality of it is,” said the mom, interrupting the brief father-daughter conspiracy of ordinary conversation, “that religion goes through the mother. It’s not Judyism at all. She’s Spinach U-turn if she’s anything.”
“What?” Andromeda and the dad said it almost in unison.
“Finnish Lutheran,” the mom repeated slowly. “She’s Scotch, Irish, French, Italian, Swedish, and Indian, mm, Native American, and, ah, Austrian, from me, plus New Jersey and L.A. and nonpracticing Jew—Jewish from you. But religion goes through the mother, so she’s technically U-turn.” Indian was familiar, if preposterous, and so was Austrian, or Australian—the mom never seemed quite sure which. But Finnish? Neither of them had ever heard that one before.
“Oy vey,” said Andromeda, and the dad laughed as the mom went back to the computer, muttering, and leaving nothing in her wake but a potentially awkward father-daughter moment. It was rare for him to be home at all. He was usually at the studio, and even when he was home he spent much of his time in his van listening to recordings of his sessions or to the radio. He liked the sound system in the van, he said. What he meant, Andromeda knew, was that the mom would complain incessantly whenever he listened to his music in the house.
“Rosalie stopped by earlier,” he said, “to drop off something for you.” He handed her a little white box tied with a sloppy green ribbon. The first-name-basis-ness of this bothered Andromeda a bit; she would have preferred for him to say “your friend Rosalie” or “that Rosalie” or something more distancing. He hovered, plainly curious as to the contents of the box, but she didn’t dare open it in front of him. There was no telling what might be inside. The mom would have simply opened it and peppered her with questions.
“What could it be, he asked knowingly,” the dad said, raising and lowering his eyebrows. Then his cell phone blipped. Judging from the violence with which he stabbed the keys with his fingers in response, the text must have come from the mom, whom Andromeda could see in the dining room, still at the computer, earbuds back in and cell out. The ’rents preferred to communicate in text form when possible.
“Your mother,” the dad said when he had finished, leaning in and slipping into one of
his unidentifiable accents, “is half Irish and half Scottish. Half of her always wants a drink and the other half never wants to pay for it.”
Andromeda gave up on the movie after a few more shouted-over maternal complaints about how “terrible” it was. She retreated to her little bedroom with her Soupy Soupy Chang Chang. (The source of this term for Lapsang souchong tea was obscure and long-forgotten, but it remained in the lexicon nonetheless.) The box from Rosalie van Genuchten contained one of Rosalie’s deep red lipsticks, used, which would have looked utterly horrible on Andromeda, and a condom (not used, thank goodness). Rosalie had a strange sense of humor. She was always leaving bizarre, random items for Andromeda. “I just stopped by to drop off this” flip-flop, stapler, stick of gum, yardstick, pinecone, etc. “She’ll be expecting it.” In this way, the blame for the weirdness landed on Andromeda, as usual. It was an inside joke that no one got but Rosalie.
Andromeda Klein had tried as best she could to arrange her room following Marsilio Ficino’s advice for decorating the dwellings of Renaissance youths, symbolically representing the heavens on the ceiling—sadly, in this case, not domed—and emphasizing the beneficial influences of Sol, Venus, and Jupiter. In this she had to be nearly as tricky and subtle as she had been in the Hidden Temple within the International House of Bookcakes, because anything too outlandish might attract the attention of the mom, who had been known to ransack and pillage a person’s room when the mood struck her. So Andromeda had tacked triangles of green, gold, and blue silk on the ceiling in what she hoped was an unobtrusive arrangement. Mentally, she’d tried to imprint them with Pixie’s images of the Empress, the Wheel of Fortune, and the Sun. This technique had failed to deemphasize Saturn enough to make much of an impact on Andromeda’s melancholy moods, although the melancholia might well have been even worse without the ceiling. Mercury, the Moon, Mars, and Saturn (that is, the Magician, the High Priestess, the Tower, and the World) she grouped, colorless, near the closet.
When Andromeda finished her tea, she performed a quick and dirty Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, for no other reason than to clear the air of confusion and preserve a bit of peace. It was always worth a try. Some authorities recommended vibrating the invocations in a voice like the howling wind, but as in the library, there was no way she could get away with any howling. The mom would charge in and strike, like lightning, or a cobra. Proper invocations would have to wait till she had her own dedicated temple, like that of Dame Frances in her secret underground chamber at the Warburg. So she whispered them instead, imagining how the wind chant might sound as she visualized the four columns of light.
She put on her Guillaume de Machaut CD (a recording from the library’s collection of an unearthly song cycle that helped to put her in a weedgie frame of mind). Practically everything she knew anything about, and possibly everything she cared to know about, resided in the International House of Bookcakes. Ars nova, or “new art,” the music was called, though it was in fact seven hundred years old. Andromeda was the only person she knew who could stand it.
She seated herself on the floor with her back against the door to read from the temple book and one of the Illuminati books by the light of a single candle. This was the best position to guard against surprise mom invasions, which no banishing ritual known to science could prevent. A couple of years back, the dad had removed all the doorknobs in the house, as the first step of a door-painting project that had never gotten past the planning stages. He had never managed to replace them, meaning no door was lockable and no room was safe, not even the bathroom. As much as the mom complained about the missing doorknobs, it was a convenient domestic espionage arrangement of which she made frequent use.
Andromeda was stroking Dave with her bare feet, the candle on the floor between her knees. “Spinach U-turn, Dave,” she said, “what do you think?” Dave responded with a silent meow. He had his own, unknowable cat religion, centered on the concept of unquestioning Dave worship, and like Andromeda on Right Ring Days, he was clearly a monarchist. He had an M of deepest black above his eyes. When he scrunched it up, as now, it turned into a V. Did Dave’s M connect him to her own numerological M, she wondered, when he was calm, whereas the V of consternation shattered the connection? She had never thought of that before. She reached over and flipped through to the table in the twentieth chapter of Agrippa’s Second Book to add up Dave Klein: 794, a number with no significant attribution that she could identify. David Klein was 802, which also could reflect 401 × 2, but she had no way to look that up at present. She really needed her own copy of 777; the library’s was missing, and the mom, during one of her manic cleaning episodes, had managed to round up and give Daisy’s to the Goodwill, along with Andromeda’s own extremely rare copy of Hecate’s Fountain, which had been a gift from Daisy. She often wondered who had it, what kind of shelf it was on, and what sort of room was absorbing its weird, weird emanations.
Anyway, Dave had never been called David, only Dave.
Dave hated noises, so he got up, stretched, and padded around her to stare up at the missing doorknob when her cell phone began to vibe-ring. She had to lean and slide forward to let him out before settling back again and answering. It was Rosalie van Genuchten, calling to complain about Afternoon Tea. It had only been Rosalie and the Thing with Two Heads—that is, Siiri Fuentes and her current boyfriend, Robbie What’s-his-face. No wonder Andromeda had been invited: things with two heads could be indescribably tiresome.
“Next time,” said Andromeda, playing with the candle flame, “if you really want me to come, it would help if you mentioned the venue.”
“It wasn’t at a venue. It was at Siiri’s house, duh.”
“Well, I didn’t know whose house,” said Andromeda, deciding against trying to explain how she had meant the word venue. She changed tack. “I’m afraid I’m not—”
“Don’t be afraid.”
“What?”
“You said you were afraid and I said don’t be. What could you possibly have to be afraid about?”
“What? I’m not.”
“Then why did you say you were?”
“What? No, it’s an expression.” She was doing it again. This was actually a more coherent conversation than some she had had with Rosalie van Genuchten. “It’s like ‘I regret to inform you, but …’ It’s like ‘I’m sorry, but …’”
“Well, you should be sorry. There was a Long Island iced tea with your name on it, Dromedary. It is no more. We had to feed it to the dog.” There was a pause, during which Andromeda thought she could hear bong bubbles. “And by the dog, I mean Robbie. I’m just kidding.” Another bubble-pause. “Anyway, it’ll be my house on Thursday. A small and sensual get-together. My mom has Investment Club, and then she goes straight to Debtors Anonymous.” Andromeda was aware: their moms went to the same Debt-Anon group.
“I have something I want to ask you about,” continued Rosalie. “A kind of favor. I’ll even give you a ride.”
“What? No Jesus Truck this time,” Andromeda said. “I mean it.” And she did mean it. The last time Rosalie had invited her so emphatically to her house, it had been a matchmaking ploy. Rosalie, Daisy, and the rest of their friends had locked Andromeda out of the house and there had been J.T waiting in the driveway.
“No, it’s nothing like that,” said Rosalie. “This will be for fun, not self-improvement.”
Jesus Truck was Kevin Maloon, a mullet-headed guy from the Thing’s community church. His bumper-stickered parent-purchased pickup truck was in every way the antithesis of the dad’s rickety anti-everything van. Daisy’s friends’ low opinion of Andromeda’s “dating” potential was clearly expressed in the sorts of guys they tried to push on her, always somebody’s boyfriend’s lamest or most insipid hanger-on. Andromeda had never seen much more of J.T. than the back of his head from a distance, but she had seen the truck and that was bad enough, even though the GENUINE PRAYER sticker, made to look like an aspirin package, was quite funny. The truck was suppos
ed to be this huge selling point, but it didn’t really do anything for her, and the Six Flags over Jesus routine was ninety percent creepy, ten percent hilarious, not quite the dream-guy formula. She wasn’t all that crazy about the back of his head, either.
The hand-me-down lipstick had been simple kindness, Rosalie said, because Andromeda’s lips were almost the same color as her face and whatever she was doing now, if anything, clearly wasn’t working. And the … other item?
“What was it? Oh, yes. That’s just in case you start looking hot and get yourself into trouble. I’m just kidding.” Good one.
Andromeda felt sudden pressure on the door against her back. “Got to go, and I won’t die,” she said in a rush, and hung up. “Don’t die” was Rosalie’s usual way of saying goodbye, on the phone or in person.
“Is that someone on the phone?” asked the mom, pushing the door open. Andromeda’s butt slid with the door along the floor. She chose her moment and slammed it shut again with her back and shoulders. One of her knees had knocked over the candle, which had gone out and had spattered an arc of tiny red beads across her leg, pinkening as they dried. She was lucky she hadn’t gotten any splinters in her legs from the flooring.
“No one, it’s okay,” she said. She almost added a bitter “Check the bill” but stopped herself. The last thing she wanted was to make the mom think of actually checking. There was no time to arrange a decoy call from Marlyne to match it.
“How can you stand that awful, awful music,” said the mom. “You shouldn’t sit against dwarves like that. You’ll hurt yourself. A person can’t walk into their own daughter’s room! Are you hiding camels in there?” She meant “lighting candles.” A ribbon of smoke hung in the air, the smell quite strong. Andromeda switched off the ars nova and braced her back against the door till the warnings about unintended camels burning down sickle family gnomes and how interns won’t cover chairlessness and negligees faded out and lost themselves amongst the faint rushing and ringing that was always somewhere in her head. She could hear the echo of Dave’s claws on the wood floor as he scampered after the mom in expectation of treats.
Andromeda Klein Page 6
