Andromeda Klein

by Frank Portman

  There really was a lot of stuff in that bag, much more than she had time to inventory just then. It was a gold mine of random items, the sort of thing Daisy would have just loved if it were someone else’s bag that she had found somewhere.

  She dug further, and pulled out some ouijanesse: Daisy’s old Little One from the Gnome School, the one that had originally belonged to Andromeda, looking very much as it had when she had last seen it twelve years ago—that is, the day before yesterday. Megasynch. And at the bottom of the bag, beneath a ragged book of sudoku puzzles, were two other books, a small coverless paperback Liber AL and The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.

  “My goodness,” she said aloud. She supposed she must have left the book at Daisy’s house while she’d had it staff-checked, and had forgotten about it. The other reason she said “my goodness” was that when she pulled the book out of the bag she was suddenly aware of Daisy’s scent, quite strong, almost overpowering, that slightly sour, lemony smell with just a hint of cinnamon. It was no big surprise: it was all Daisy’s stuff, after all. Still, it felt weedgie, as it almost always did.

  Andromeda put the Little One, the books, and the paper items in her book bag, which was more or less waterproof, and rolled over the paper shopping bag and bundled it into her bike’s front basket, the wig and sun hat still on her head, while the elms and poplars stood by, silently disapproving, it seemed to her, of the notion of a lesser mortal assuming the raiment of Twice Holy Soror Daisy Wasserstrom. She had barely left them behind when she felt the first large raindrop on her nose. Then another. The paper bag wouldn’t last long if it kept up. She stopped under the overhang by the water fountains and took off the sun hat and arranged it over her basket, tying it down with the hat’s green ribbon. That would afford some protection, at least.

  By the time she reached Rosalie’s house, the rain was coming down hard. She was soaking wet on the outside and sweaty underneath the vinyl coat, but the paper Daisy bag was more or less intact. She parked her bike under the patio roof in the back. She was torn about whether or not to bring in the Daisy bag. She doubted anyone would be around to steal it if she left it out, yet it was a risk. In the end, though, she decided to leave it in the basket with the sun hat tied around it, because the Thing with Two Heads was likely to be there and Mizmac went to the same church, and Andromeda didn’t want it getting back to Mizmac that Andromeda Klein was carrying around a bag of her deceased daughter’s stuff, especially with all that ouijanesse kicking around in there.

  The van Genuchten house was huge. The far end of the basement was set up like a second living room, with couches, chairs, and an entertainment center. Rosalie’s mother left it pretty much exclusively to the kids; that is, Rosalie and her little sister and the brother who still lived at home. Rosalie’s mother would even knock on the door before entering, and the door had a lock that worked. The basement room had its own entrance at the back of the house, through a sliding glass door, looking out on the patio and pool.

  The pool had been left uncovered. Andromeda paused to admire the beautiful sight, the needles of rain and speckles of reflected light on the water’s surface, seeing quite clearly in her mind how Pixie might have painted it as a backdrop for one of her Swords cards. Then she shouldered her book bag and walked over to the glass and knocked.

  She might as well not have bothered with trying to be discreet about the Daisy bag, because as she was knocking she caught sight of her reflection in the sliding glass door and was reminded of what she was wearing. She had meant to remove at least the wig. The door slid open. The Thing with Two Heads was right in front of her, the rest of the company stretching for what seemed like several layers behind it.

  “Is that Daisy’s kibble wing?” said one of the Thing’s two heads, the female one, Siiri Fuentes. “Chemo wig,” she meant. It wasn’t really. Daisy had liked to wear wigs even before being diagnosed with leukemia; this one probably predated her chemotherapy by at least a year.

  In the confusion, Andromeda forgot to keep her hip cocked to the side to keep the belt up, and it snaked past her hips and down her legs like an inexpertly managed hula hoop. Someone took a cell-phone picture. “Not good,” said Altiverse AK in a Groucho accent, mimicking the dad.

  The Thing stepped aside and Andromeda pulled up the belt and walked in, taking off the dripping wig and hanging it on the corner coatrack as she went by, as though it were a hat. No one thought this was as funny as it actually was. There were way too many people in that room, and she instantly regretted having come, but at least Jesus Truck wasn’t one of them.

  “You really know how to make an entrance, Man-dromeda,” said Rosalie, holding an enormous jug. “I made a pitcher of martinis. You can have one if you behave yourself. What is up with your hair?”

  “Seriously,” said Amy the Wicker Girl.

  Rosalie poured her a drink in a large coffee mug with Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet on it.

  “I want you in me,” said Rosalie van Genuchten, addressing her martini glass, holding it up before taking a quick gulp.

  Andromeda Klein was still cringing inwardly at “Man-dromeda”—a new one that Rosalie had probably been preparing all day, waiting to spring on her; that could indeed have been the sole reason Andromeda had been invited to this session of Afternoon Tea. Or perhaps Man-dromeda was just a comment on the way Daisy’s studded skull belt had dramatically highlighted the accursed narrowness of her hips.

  Two boys were on the couch in front of the TV playing a zombie video game. One was Rosalie’s brother, Theo, and the other was one of the monkey boys who had helped with her bike the other day. The Thing with Two Heads ambled over to sit down next to them, Siiri on Robbie What’s-his-face’s lap: her hands were on his knees, and his hands were on her hands, making them look even more like a single creature. Amy the Wicker Girl and two girls Andromeda didn’t know were standing by, waiting to be introduced.

  “Bethany and Stace, meet Andromeda,” Rosalie van Genuchten said. “She can’t drive, she dances like a boy, she’s got no ass, and she’s a teenage witch.”

  “Oh, brother,” said Altiverse AK.

  “I’m just kidding,” Rosalie added. “And you all know Elisabeth,” she continued, slapping her stomach. The summer before last, they had all named their stomachs, though Rosalie seemed to be the only one who still kept it up. (Daisy had, in fact, mischievously named hers Rosalie.) Rosalie was always talking about how she needed to “get rid of” Elisabeth, or at least get her under control, but in fact Rosalie looked great and Andromeda would have traded anything for a body even remotely like hers. No one would ever call Rosalie Flat Chest-a.

  “And Charles is here too,” Rosalie finally said, blowing a kiss at her laptop, which was open on the table. She turned it around, and Andromeda saw Charles Iskiw’s face looking out of a video chat window. Charles was Rosalie’s dime soda boyfriend. He was away at college in Southern California and was now touring with his rock band back east, but evidently they still kept in touch through video chat.

  “He’s having martinis too,” she added. “A small and sensual get-together, coast to coast. We are Afternoon Tea, and we are awesome.”

  Rosalie pressed some keys and Charles’s face grew to full-screen size. His pixelly hand raised a paper cup, and the crackly, metallic voice coming out of the laptop speaker said something Andromeda couldn’t quite make out over the sound of the video game, the scattered conversation, and the throbbing machinelike music coming from the stereo speakers. As she always did when entering a new room, Andromeda identified the exits. Even a slight increase in chaos could quite well push her over the edge into an anxiety attack, and she paused to make certain she knew the quickest way out, just in case—it would have to be the sliding doors, rather than the door to the stairs up to the main house, because she would need to get her bike before she could escape. The rain was really coming down hard now. The strip of sky just visible through the glass door above the curtain was extremely dark for the time
of day, late afternoon.

  The girl named Bethany said, “Andromeda, that’s such an unusual name.”

  “What?”

  In Greek mythology, Andromeda is an Ethiopian princess whose parents chained her to a rock to be eaten by a sea monster sent by Poseidon to punish her mother for insulting some sea nymphs. She is rescued by Perseus, who takes possession of her after turning her fiancé to stone with the Gorgon’s head he is carrying in a bag. Or it’s also a constellation and galaxy M31, or a science fiction book about a space disease …

  Andromeda was so caught up in her own train of thought that she couldn’t choose what to try to say.

  “It means sea-monster bait,” she finally said, on Altiverse AK’s prompting. “The Chained Maiden.”

  Bethany responded with a nod and a quick though not unkind “whatever” expression.

  “Our Andromeda is just a bit weird,” said Rosalie. “I’m just kidding.”

  “It’s good to be weird,” said Bethany. Oh, if only the people who went around saying things like that really meant them.

  Bethany reminded Andromeda of somebody, but she couldn’t quite place it. A familiar-looking face. Kind of soothing to look at.

  “You’re hopeless,” said Altiverse AK, and there was no denying it.

  “Come on, everybody,” said Rosalie without looking up from the laptop monitor. “Drink more!”

  ix.

  You could stab yourself in the heart with the pointy top of the floor lamp. You could unscrew the lightbulb and stick your fingers in the socket, sucking on them first to get them wet. If you were strong enough, you could attach a couple of long extension cords to the television and carry it out through the sliding doors to the pool, turn it on, and jump in with it, or you could simply fill your pockets with stones. You could expose the wires of the electrical outlet and hold on, or simply poke something thin and metal into the socket. You could pull the weatherstripping off the windows and door, tie the pieces together, and hang yourself from a door or window frame. You could take all the heavy objects in the room, load them on the couch, prop it up with a yardstick, position yourself underneath one of the legs, and knock the yardstick down….

  Taking an inventory of the room and imagining all the possible ways in which these objects could be used to commit suicide was a reliable method of distracting and quieting the mind in stressful social situations. Andromeda had once counted twenty-nine in this room, though at this moment she was stuck on eighteen.

  It didn’t take many swallows for Andromeda to feel the martini. She quickly lost track of time. The space between her and the others in the room seemed to expand. This was partly because of the drink and partly because she never understood much of what they were talking about anyway—the TV shows she’d never seen, the celebrities she’d never heard of, and all the bands, bands, bands. She couldn’t begin to keep track of them, and she failed whenever she tried to educate herself about them because they all sounded the same to her, and when it came down to it she wasn’t that interested. Absolutely everyone seemed to be in a band, and all the people in their bands were in other bands too, plus there were other bands, real ones, from other cities, who had CDs and so forth, who were exactly like the ones who weren’t famous. She couldn’t tell the real ones from the fake ones by the way they sounded or looked. The thumping machine music had been replaced by one of these bands: baseball caps, sneakers, sunglasses, growling voices saying “hey” and “whoa” all the time, and “I’m in love with” this or that.

  She had regretted coming almost as soon as she’d entered the room. That said, she had to admit, the martini was helping.

  Andromeda leaned against the wall sipping, more or less enjoying the faint sensation of the center of consciousness in her head falling backward and righting itself, then beginning to flip again. Mixed drinks did that much better than wine, which was what she always drank at home, when she refilled the Daisy scrying bottle with Carlo Rossi from the parents’ jug in the pantry.

  Christmas trees, she thought, sipping her drink in silence. It wasn’t the best martini in the world. Everyone at the Old Folks Home knew that Andromeda Klein’s drink was a Bombay martini, up with olive. This had come about because it was the only drink whose name she could think of at the time, a choice that charted the course of the rest of her short drinking life up to the current moment. While the others occupied themselves killing zombies on video, and nodding to the monotonous music, and chattering about things she couldn’t really hear anyway, Andromeda stared at her cup and thought. The thought chain could be traced, quite far back if you stretched it, all the way to the gods and goddesses of the Egyptians and even perhaps to the formation of the earth and heavens out of limitless nothing, but at least as far back as the Water Tower Temple Working that had predicted St. Steve’s arrival. The backward sequence went: cup, Ned Ned, the Old Folks Home, the hedge behind John Street, the Gold Duster, the DMV, the IRS, the library, the copy machine, St. Steve, A. E. Waite, Daisy, the Water Tower Temple …

  It had once been a functioning water tower or storage tank, but now it was simply a great cylindrical shell of deep-rusted, flaking iron on the hill overlooking, yet far, far above, McKinley Intermediate School. From a distance it looked like a tiny reddish earthen jar or a pot missing its lid. It had been damaged by fire. The roof was long gone. There was a bit of illegible graffiti on the outside, up to a height of about ten feet or so, but there wasn’t as much as there might have been because it was actually rather hard to reach. It sat on a narrow shelf of rock, with a sharp drop on either side, created by a series of disastrous mudslides in the seventies that had destroyed several houses—the kind they built propped up against the hill on stilts—and even killed some people below, including some children at McKinley, which had been a high school at the time. (This account was in the Hillmont-Clearview land survey publication documenting the event in the IHOB’s reference collection, and it had been discussed in the news again because of the recent heavy rains and the fear of more mudslides in the softer areas of upper Hillmont.)

  To get to the abandoned tank, you had to climb a steep, crumbly hill in the front, or take the long way around the back and climb down, and this way involved traversing a gulley. There were more conveniently located spots for clandestine drinking and drug-taking and making out and whatnot. Every time Andromeda noticed evidence of people having made the effort, beer cans or cigarette butts or the like, she was surprised. It was quite rare.

  The only way to enter the tower cylinder itself was through a small hole in the side, where a pipeline had once been. Andromeda could make it through easily, as could Daisy with a bit more effort. Rosalie and Elisabeth would have had a tough time, had they ever been in a position to try. It was the perfect temple. They used spray paint to decorate it with the proper symbols, modifying them for this or that working, hanging silks and banners when necessary. Never did they find anything disturbed when they returned. The floor didn’t drain very well, so during the rainy stretches it would get boggy and clogged with fallen eucalyptus leaves. They had used large rocks and other objects to build a causeway through the mud, leading from the opening to the center altar and from there to all four compass points. It was even possible to circumambulate the altar, with large steps, though there were gaps in the circle of stones because it was a work in progress and it wasn’t all that easy to find stones of the right size in the vicinity.

  This was the scene of their best and most effective magical workings. On a clear night with a good moon, there was just enough silver light coming through the open roof, filtered through the eucalyptus, to read by; and when it had rained heavily enough to flood it, the light reflected from the pools of water was beautiful and weedgie; the interior was sheltered from wind, so candles and lamps tended to stay lit.

  One of these workings had, in Andromeda’s view, directly conjured St. Steve, who appeared exactly three days after the elaborate love spell (which had incidentally conjured a boyfriend for Daisy as
well, a boy named Lawrence, who had been found parked outside Daisy’s house when they got back home). St. Steve she had first noticed trying to use the library’s ancient copy machine, which wasn’t working at the time. Andromeda had added toner, but it still didn’t work, so she offered to make copies for him on the machine in the back. It was a flyer advertising a car for sale and some tax forms from the tax form binders in Reference. She noted the name, Andrew Elliot, though she was later to regret not thinking to look for other information, like the address or birth date. She never did learn his exact age or where he lived.

  “Sorry they didn’t come out that well,” she said when she emerged from the staff area. “This isn’t the best place to make copies.” She was nervous talking to him, but she was nervous talking to most people. She wondered if people in the library, Marlyne, Gordon, or any of the patrons, were watching her. Her face felt red and her heart pounded. There was nothing very special about him, and he seemed completely uninterested in her. There was no reason for her to react that way. It was as though her body could tell the future and was getting a head start, as though it knew she would soon be all twisted up mentally on his account, for his sake. There might have been a bit of the trademark Andromeda reverse magic going on, because the thought did occur to her and she might well have articulated it, as a kind of joke: What would happen if I flipped out and got totally obsessed with this guy just because of the stupid Water Tower Working? It seemed so unlikely, but it was what happened.

  She was sweating, like she did all too often, and it must have been obvious to him because he asked her if she was all right.

  “Yeah,” she said. “No. It’s always too hot in here.”

  “It is, yeah,” he said. “Well, thanks anyway, Monique? Maryanne? Madeleine?” If he hadn’t tried out those names and pointed to her M pendant, she might never have thought to check his name against Agrippa’s Latin gematria tables. But he had asked and she had begun to tell him, “Mille,” meaning “one thousand.” And then he said, “Thanks, Millie,” and turned to walk away.