Andromeda Klein

by Frank Portman

  The first, conventional phrase THIS IS MY WISH TO always reduces to MYWISO. The further reduced letters for the full sigil were thus MYWDAHKG. Rearranged to a Carrollian mantra, this yielded hwkadygm, which she pronounced “hook-a-dime.” This she chanted under her breath as she drew diagram after diagram, slowly refining the letters into a single glyph embodying her wish to encounter the King of Sacramento in a lucid or astral dream or in crystal-that is, as an image in the wine bottle’s dark mirror.

  She used her dedicated ritual pen and the same consecrated black ink she used for her tattoos to draw the finished sigil on a square of parchment, within a perfect doubled circle drawn with her compass.

  The next step was to charge the symbol, focusing on the image and imprinting it in the deep mind. Then you were supposed to destroy the physical talisman and forget all about it, allowing it to do its work on the level of the unconscious. For the King of Sacramento dream sigil, she charged it thus: she tied her wrists together, drank the wine, intoned the mantra, and, while the square of parchment was burning in the incense burner, attached her tied wrists to her chair’s lower rung with another piece of cord. Then she held her breath, looking into the wine bottle’s deep, dark, multiple mysterious flames and visualizing the burning glyph’s lines in flashing, lightning-colored astral hues.

  Her vision became patchy and her head throbbed, and a curtain of darkness began to drop over her. Then she felt herself rising quickly and began to see color flashes with spiraling shadows that looked like faces and streaks of white-flecked green light rushing by. There was a deafening cacophony of voices, some screechy and mechanical, some resonant and burbling, till they too began to fade, as though becoming distant, and when she was far enough away from them they began to sound less harsh and threatening and chaotic and more like a kind of music.

  She found herself in a sort of dreamworld. The King of Sacramento was nowhere to be seen, but the distant backdrop of yellow-brown hills and towers, of trees and shallow pools, might conceivably have been a scene drawn by Pixie. The sun shone down from between the clouds, and the rays seemed to carry the echo of music, grand and harmonious, the sound of a chorus of countless voices and trumpets, quiet and barely perceptible, reaching earth like a fine mist or a subtle color.

  The earth to which it fell was quite concrete and mundane. The scene unfolded like a memory. She was four. It was her first day at the Gnome School, long ago. She had been removed from her regular kindergarten in the middle of the school year, because she had been bad and had gotten her parents in trouble by misbehaving and getting hurt. She was meeting Daisy for the first time, even though they discovered, once they became friendly, that they lived down the street from one another. They were outside the building with Teacher Joycelin, waiting to be picked up by their mothers.

  “I’ll be your friend if you promise to do everything I say,” said Daisy.

  “Okay,” said the four-year-old Andromeda. She was inside her four-year-old self, seeing through those eyes, but she was also seeing the scene from some other vantage point, as though watching a movie; and she was aware of her motionless, entranced, embodied self lying still on the floor of her bedroom.

  Each Gnome School kindergartener had a wispy white doll with a pointed head and no face, referred to as a Little One. Daisy threw her Little One into the parking lot, looked at Andromeda, and said, “Pick it up and give it to me.” Andromeda gave her a puzzled look but hurried to comply once Daisy repeated the command impatiently. Teacher Joycelin snatched Andromeda out of the way as a car narrowly missed her. The teacher was yelling at her, but Andromeda was watching Daisy, who was looking back at her with a blank expression. When Teacher Joycelin was through with cautioning her against running out into traffic, Andromeda rejoined Daisy, who merely shook her head and pointed to the Little One, still lying on the dusty asphalt. Andromeda retrieved it and handed it to her.

  “Okay,” said Daisy. “You can be my friend.” But she was looking at the soiled Little One with a sad expression, so Andromeda said, “Maybe my mommy can clean it.” So Daisy and Andromeda exchanged Little Ones. You were supposed to hand-wash them, but Andromeda’s mother put hers through the washing machine and it ended up kind of pinkish and misshapen when it came out, and Daisy decided not to have it back. Your Little One was supposed to be like a little you, a little self to whom you told your secrets. Andromeda wondered if Daisy could hear the secrets she whispered, since she had Daisy’s Little One instead of her own; but she was certain she couldn’t hear any of Daisy’s secrets, if indeed Daisy ever whispered any into the nonexistent ear of the faceless Little One that used to be Andromeda’s. Even then, Daisy was a mystery to her.

  Little Ones didn’t come cheap, and Andromeda’s mother shouted about it.

  “We have a better house than you,” Daisy said, when they went to Andromeda’s house to play after school that day. She turned on her heel and briskly walked out, never looking back, but clearly confident that Andromeda would follow her. Andromeda liked her own house, but Daisy’s was bigger and had more stuff in it. Back in those days Daisy’s parents had been married. Her mother smiled at Daisy and Andromeda and gave them cookies, and played a game with them where they made a castle and a king and queen and knights out of wooden blocks and kitchen utensils and aluminum foil. Gnome School families were forbidden to have plastic toys or television or computers in the home. Daisy’s house was full of expensive wooden toys and cushions and drapes of gentle, fuzzy rainbow colors. The Wasserstroms had put a lot of effort into the Gnome School environment, which the Kleins had not come close to matching. Mr. Wasserstrom winked at Andromeda and gave her a friendly smile and said, “What a pretty name!” when she was introduced to him when he came home from work. “My best friend in college was a Klein,” he said later, walking her home. She hadn’t known there were any other Kleins, and thought it might be a joke, so she laughed shyly and hesitantly. He laughed too, a warm laugh with an accompanying smile like sunshine. Her wrist and forearm were killing her on that walk back, but she tried her best to smile and be good.

  He was an architect and had brought home rolls of old plans that day for Daisy to draw on, but Mrs. Wasserstrom gave him a look that Andromeda would later understand: drawing was forbidden to Gnome School kindergarteners, who weren’t supposed to be exposed to the limits of the line or the color black till they were old enough to handle it. Until a certain stage of Gnomeschooling, which Andromeda never reached, you were supposed to use wet paint on wet paper, to guarantee that vague color blobs rather than representative figures would result. Andromeda was to excel at formless, vague blob art. Daisy, who could actually draw well, even as a little girl, had to do her real drawing in secret, like so much you had to do when you were in the Gnome School. Mrs. W. pulled him into the kitchen so they could have an argument about it. The Gnome School caused many arguments between Andromeda’s parents too.

  “Get me a drink of water,” said Daisy in a haughty royal voice, holding the lemon-juicer queen and moving it from side to side and up and down as though it were speaking. Andromeda was playing the role of the tinfoil knights directed by the queen to fight each other. Andromeda dutifully went to the kitchen to get a glass of water for Queen Daisy and found Daisy’s parents kissing, something she had never seen her own parents doing. She was very embarrassed. Mr. and Mrs. Wasserstrom giggled, and Mrs. W. poured out two purple plastic glasses of water from the refrigerator jug, two other things (a jug in the fridge and parental giggling) Andromeda had never seen before. When she returned with the glasses of chilled water, Daisy kept one for herself and poured the other into the fishbowl.

  “Harold is thirsty too,” she said. Harold was her pet fish, who didn’t like the ice water and was to die shortly thereafter.

  “Queen!” Daisy’s shaking queen had said, meaning “I win.”

  When the time came for Andromeda to go home, Daisy ran up and threw her arms around her, and said, “You’re my favorite favorite.” She kissed Andromeda on th
e cheek, and was looking at her mom while she did it, and Mrs. W. smiled back at her as though she were the loveliest little angel. What her mother didn’t know was that all the time, Daisy was twisting Andromeda’s wrist in opposite directions behind her back, what Andromeda later learned was called an Indian burn. She was too embarrassed to cry out, plus she knew it wouldn’t be appreciated, but the tears slid from her eyes, and Daisy’s parents looked at her with a puzzled, pitying look, which she later grew to recognize, as many, many grown-ups would look at her in much the same way.

  By nightfall her wrist and arm had swelled to double their normal size. Andromeda had to skip the following day of Gnome School to see the doctor, and when she returned the next day she had a cast, making her temporarily the most popular kindergartener in the school. “Gold star, goofy,” said Daisy. “Good girl.”

  Wait, that wasn’t right, it was the older Daisy who said “gold star” and “goofy” instead of “honey,” and “good girl,” not the kindergarten Daisy … or was it St. Steve who used to say that? Did they both used to say it? But that didn’t make sense. Text-messaging and predictive-text typos hadn’t even been invented yet. The timing was all off. There were two tiny birds with sharp steel beaks pecking at her head, screeching, the alternating pecks so fast they trilled and echoed.

  Then the trilling metallic pecking sound was coming from outside her head, beyond thick dark curtains. She pulled them apart and pulled herself through, into her flickering room, where she found herself lying on her back on the floor. Dave had tucked himself together neatly on her chest while she was out, and was purring. The back of her head hurt where she had bumped it. She detached her hands from the chair rung and switched off the kitchen timer, which she had set for thirty minutes. This was recommended for astral travel and séances in which candles were used, just in case you lost your way wherever you were or didn’t notice if a fire started. She might really have ended up as one of the mom’s “Corona Slurpees and bastards.”

  She banished the temple, removed her robe, put away the altar, and re-dressed herself in underwear, stockings, jeans, boots, T-shirt, and black hooded sweatshirt.

  Magic could be hit or miss. Sometimes it didn’t seem to work at all; other times, things certainly happened, but they weren’t the particular things you were going for. Still other times, as now, it was hard to say what happened. This experience was more like a memory than a dream, though it had contained details she hadn’t been aware of, such as the cause of Harold’s death and walking in on Daisy’s parents kissing and the fact that the broken wrist, her first official breakage that she remembered very well indeed, had resulted from Daisy’s Indian burn.

  The dream, or vision or whatever it had been, had zipped back and forth in time, too, even though she had experienced it from within her four-year-old self as though it were happening in real time. And it had gotten all mixed up at the end. Andromeda wasn’t certain how closely it squared with her actual memory, and as soon as she asked herself the question, the dream details integrated themselves with it, indistinguishable from whatever her memory had contained before. Had she really time-traveled astrally?

  Whether it had been a dream or a kind of memory, the sigil magic had seemed to send her back to the past, even if it hadn’t actually conjured the King of Sacramento. Not yet it hadn’t, anyway. Sigils of this kind were supposed to work forgotten in the background, after all.

  v.

  Anorexic.

  No ass.

  Deaf.

  Retrogressive.

  Old-lady hands.

  Maledicted.

  Evil.

  Demon girl.

  A strange child.

  Ambivalent.

  Nondescript.

  Dire.

  Reticent.

  Odd duck.

  Malformed inner core.

  Ectomorph.

  Drunkard.

  Addicted to love.

  Language Arts the previous day had been devoted to poems called acrostics, in which each line was to begin with the first letter of your name, and Andromeda was working on the assignment in her head on her way to school. Clearview High School was very acrostics-focused, she realized, now that she knew the word for it. The school motto, displayed on banners in the quad and recited once a day during the KCHS announcements, was T.E.A.C.H. (Teamwork, Effort, Achievement, Citizenship, Hard work hard work hard work!)

  Did they realize, or did they care, that they gave high school students and second graders the same assignments? In high school, of course, the “poems” no longer had to take the shape of an ice cream cone. And they were now organized by theme: the first was supposed to be how the world saw you, and number two was how you saw yourself. Andromeda Klein wasn’t so sure there was that much of a difference, nor was she sure she could turn these in, in the end. She didn’t want to get dinged for negativity or reported to the authorities for being a sociopath or a noncomformist.

  There was no rain today, but the sky had remained a reassuring deep gray all week. You were supposed to greet the sun and perform a brief solar ritual four times a day, as prescribed in Liber Resh, but she had let that slide since Daisy’s death, and almost always forgot. In the days of the Ninety-threes at their most observant she and Daisy used to keep up with it fairly well, though Daisy usually abbreviated it to her own taste and would often simply grab Andromeda’s hand, drag her to an open area, and shout “Resh!” and jump around. Everyone looked at them like they were crazy, which was part of why Daisy did it, the main reason, perhaps. These days Andromeda could summon very little enthusiasm for the sun and its poisonous, accursed rays. This attitude nullified whatever spiritual effect reshing might have had, she was pretty sure, but now that she thought of it, and in honor of Daisy more than for any other reason, she glanced eastward and muttered a desultory “Hail to thee who art Ra in thy rising.”

  You couldn’t miss the burned building from the fire overnight. The top-floor, corner window of a small, two-story apartment building at the end of the block had been blown out. The whole corner was blackened and obviously destroyed inside, but the building still stood and the rest of it seemed relatively unaffected. A pile of half-burned timber and trash was on the street. The sour smell of wet ash and charcoal was overwhelming. Andromeda thought she could smell Daisy underneath it, so she stopped to sniff, but then it was gone.

  She noticed, caught in the branches of a tree across the street from the building, a charred paperback book, which appeared to have been blown there through the window by the force of the explosion. Strangely enough, it happened to tip and fall into her bicycle basket as she stood looking up at it, straddling her bike on tiptoe, and the only visible word on what remained of the cover was Tower. Nice synch, Universe, thought Andromeda Klein. A bit heavy-handed, wouldn’t you say? The Tower is a form of the Hebrew letter peh, which means “mouth,” and the black, empty window certainly looked like one, gaping and stinking too.

  “Call the police .” Too late for that. Here was one part of the Daisy dream replicated almost perfectly in real life, a burnt-out upper floor with a burnt book falling out of it. She looked around for other elements but could discern none. Daisy as an antidrug crusader from beyond? That seemed very unlikely. Still, stumbling on a real live Tower was nothing to take lightly. The singed title page of the book revealed it to be The Black Tower by P. D. James, a mystery, and the bar code on the back revealed that it was in fact from the International House of Bookcakes collection. How strange to imagine a methamphetamine manufacturer curling up with a cozy P. D. James novel, blown to bits just before the killer’s identity was revealed.

  She pushed off and pedaled. She had to stop by the ATM on her way to school. Everyone else drove. The school wasn’t far from her house, but if she’d had a license and a car like everyone else she’d have driven too. Both of Andromeda’s driving tests had ended with her driving into a hedge; the first time had been accidental, because she had been in the dad’s jerky van and couldn’t quite c
ontrol the acceleration, while the second had been deliberate, because even though she had been in Rosalie’s mom’s more reliable car, she had wanted to end the test—the DMV man had been obnoxious and insulting and had tried to look up her skirt, she was sure, even though he had also made malicious observations about how skinny her legs were. She had panicked, and suddenly: a hedge had appeared, a different one this time. “You need a few more lessons,” he had said dryly, failing her. “And a thicker skin.”

  Everyone was always telling her to “lighten up” after hassling her.

  The third and final time, so far, that she had driven a car into a hedge had been at the wheel of St. Steve’s Plymouth Gold Duster, and that had been because she had been nervous and scared and excited and sad all at the same time and because some force beyond her control had diverted her attention at an inopportune moment and placed a hedge in her way. Clearview was all hedges. It was amazing they didn’t cause more accidents.

  She got forty dollars out of the ATM. Then she had to turn back halfway up the hill and dig through the trash because she realized that she had thrown the money away and put the receipt in her bag rather than the other way around. Head explosion sound. Had the world ever known a bigger, more comprehensively idiotic idiot?

  The name “St. Steve” was a classic Andromeda Klein misheard utterance that got stuck in the lexicon.

  He was the only person she had ever met who seemed to appreciate the lexicon as much as she did. Most people rolled their eyes or smiled weakly when she tried to involve them, though it was true that several of the lexicon’s terms had made it into the Klein family vocabulary after years of repetition. With St. Steve, though, it was effortless. It was amazing how little work she had to do when he was around. By the end of their first evening at the Old Folks Home, they had already acquired several other terms besides “St. Steve.” She told him a few preexisting ones; some came up naturally; soon he joined in and created some himself, which was an amazing thing that no one had ever thought of doing before. He’d had her almost completely figured out, she realized later, after a single conversation.